Vitalik Buterin Outlines ‘Cryptographic World Computer’ Plan for Ethereum

Ethereum’s next upgrade will be the last one anyone from 2015 would recognize, its co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in a post published on Saturday.

Hegota, the fork scheduled for next year, is “likely to be Ethereum’s last ‘normal’ fork,” he said. What follows involves recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, heavily optimized consensus and making the lot quantum-safe.

A post-Lean Ethereum is called a blockchain “to a large extent for historical reasons,” Buterin wrote.

In reality, he argued, it is a “hybrid construction” merging Satoshi Nakamoto’s ideas with cryptographic machinery that came out of 50 years of academic work and “did not even exist” in 2009. That architecture, he tweeted, will “enable much more powerful properties” than blockchain alone.

Verification, consensus, and block construction

Three core properties are being replaced outright. Verification moves from downloading and re-executing every block to sampling data with PeerDAS and checking a SNARK. Consensus moves to a “much better optimized” proof of stake model. And block construction moves from one miner deciding what goes in, to multiple parties building it together.

Finality would arrive in 8 to 32 seconds against roughly 200 seconds for 12 confirmations today, slots would run 4 to 8 seconds, and running a node would demand far less hardware. Censorship resistance would come from FOCIL, a scheme in which a committee of validators each publishes a list of pending transactions the next block must contain, enforced by the fork-choice rule so that blocks omitting them are ignored. Buterin described the result as “guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion.”

Privacy arrives in pieces, with general-purpose computation remaining expensive and only partly private, while special-purpose applications get “very strong privacy” from zero-knowledge proofs and private account abstraction. Onion routing and mixnets would cover the network layer, work the Ethereum Foundation resourced with a dedicated privacy cluster launched last October.

Developers would feel the shift in gas costs. The same computation will cost more “if you shove it all into one inscrutable serially-executed transaction,” Buterin wrote, and less if it is split into dependencies that can be parallelized or stripped out before the transaction reaches a block.

Decentralization as an advantage

Decentralization is ceasing to be purely a cost, Buterin argued. It lets data be stored in parallel, computation to happen in parallel inside the mempool, and metadata to be hidden in ways a centralized system cannot manage.

That was the mid-2010s dream, he said, and it failed then for one reason: there was no way to verify that split-up work had been done correctly. Committees sampled at random were “complicated to set up and expensive,” added latency, and offered “no recourse if the committee fails.” Modern cryptography solves it, with overhead “decreasing month by month.”

Further out sits indistinguishability obfuscation, which Buterin describes as the holy grail because it would remove the tradeoff between privacy and generality altogether. He is explicit that nothing in the post depends on it, and that “all of the conclusions in this post will apply long before any of that becomes available.”

The harder near-term problem is relatively mundane. Making zero-knowledge proofs fast and safe enough is “encapsulated complexity” already being optimized with AI tools, he wrote. Managing and parallelizing access to very large amounts of state remains “more difficult, and systemically complex.”

The post reads as a plain-language companion to the Strawmap, the Ethereum Foundation’s draft schedule of seven forks through 2029 that Buterin called “a very important document” when Justin Drake published it in February. Where that lays out dependencies fork by fork, Buterin’s post points to the ultimate destination, with slot times falling from 12 seconds to two, finality dropping from roughly 16 minutes to single digits, and the whole network replaced component by component in what Buterin then called a “ship of Theseus” rebuild.