Overview
- Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, shared his vision titled "The cryptographic world computer" on Saturday, outlining the network's direction for the next ten years.
- He claims Ethereum has evolved into a blend of blockchain technology and advanced cryptography, and refers to it as a blockchain mainly for historical context.
- Users can expect transaction finality within 8 to 32 seconds, a significant improvement over the current average of approximately 200 seconds for 12 confirmations.
In a recent post, Vitalik Buterin discussed how Ethereum's upcoming upgrades will be the last recognizable ones for those familiar with its 2015 inception. He indicated that the Hegota fork, anticipated for next year, will likely be Ethereum's final traditional fork. Future developments will incorporate recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, enhanced consensus mechanisms, and quantum safety.
The cryptographic world computer: https://t.co/ueayODeUPo
This is my attempt to succinctly convey the essence of everything planned for Ethereum post-Hegota. It’s no longer just a blockchain; it’s a hybrid…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 27, 2026
Buterin also remarked that Ethereum is labeled a blockchain largely for historical reasons. He emphasized that it represents a "hybrid construction" that merges the foundational concepts of Satoshi Nakamoto with cryptographic advancements developed over the past 50 years, many of which were not even available in 2009. This architecture, he suggested, will facilitate significantly more powerful capabilities than traditional blockchain technology.
Innovations in Verification, Consensus, and Block Construction
Three fundamental elements are being completely revamped. Verification will transition from the current method of downloading and re-executing every block to utilizing PeerDAS for data sampling and SNARK verification. The consensus model will be upgraded to a significantly more optimized proof of stake system. Additionally, block construction will shift from being determined by a single miner to a collaborative effort among multiple parties.
Transaction finality is expected to be achieved in 8 to 32 seconds, compared to the current 200 seconds for 12 confirmations, with slots operating in 4 to 8 seconds, and node operation requiring significantly less hardware. Censorship resistance will be strengthened through FOCIL, a mechanism where a validator committee publishes a list of pending transactions that must be included in the next block, enforced by the fork-choice rule, thus ensuring that blocks omitting these transactions are disregarded. Buterin described this outcome as "guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion."
Privacy features will be introduced incrementally, with general-purpose computations remaining costly and only partially private, while specific applications will benefit from robust privacy via zero-knowledge proofs and private account abstraction. The network layer will be secured with onion routing and mixnets, supported by a dedicated privacy cluster launched by the Ethereum Foundation last October.
Developers can expect changes in gas fees, as costs for computations will increase if all processes are bundled into a single, complex transaction, whereas splitting them into manageable dependencies will reduce costs.
The Advantages of Decentralization
Buterin posited that decentralization is transitioning from being merely an expense to an advantage. It allows for parallel data storage, concurrent computations within the mempool, and obscured metadata in ways that centralized systems cannot achieve.
This was a vision from the mid-2010s that ultimately fell short due to the lack of mechanisms to verify the accuracy of distributed tasks. Randomly sampled committees proved complicated and costly, adding latency and providing no recourse for failures. However, advancements in modern cryptography are reducing these overheads continually.
Looking further ahead, Buterin mentioned indistinguishability obfuscation as a potential breakthrough that could eliminate the trade-off between privacy and generality, although he clarified that the current developments do not rely on this technology, and all conclusions drawn are applicable long before such advancements are available.
The immediate challenge remains the optimization of zero-knowledge proofs to ensure they are both fast and secure, a task that is currently being enhanced with AI tools. Additionally, managing and parallelizing access to vast amounts of state presents a more complex and systemic challenge.
The article serves as a straightforward companion to the Strawmap, a draft schedule from the Ethereum Foundation outlining seven forks planned through 2029, which Buterin referred to as "a very important document" upon its release in February. While the Strawmap delineates dependencies for each fork, Buterin's insights focus on the ultimate goals, with slot times decreasing from 12 seconds to 2, finality times dropping from approximately 16 minutes to single digits, and a complete network overhaul occurring component by component, which Buterin likened to a "ship of Theseus" reconstruction.