Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a post on Saturday outlining what he describes as the network's evolution over the next decade, framing Ethereum as transitioning from a traditional blockchain to a 'cryptographic world computer.'
Buterin argues that Ethereum is already a hybrid of blockchain technology and modern cryptography, and is called a blockchain 'to a large extent for historical reasons.' The architecture merges ideas from Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto with cryptographic advances from 50 years of academic work that did not exist in 2009, he wrote.
Major Technical Changes
Three core properties are being fundamentally redesigned. Verification will shift from downloading and re-executing every block to sampling data with PeerDAS and checking a SNARK. Consensus will move to a 'much better optimized' proof of stake model. Block construction will move from a single miner deciding contents to multiple parties building it together.
These changes would result in finality arriving in 8 to 32 seconds, compared to roughly 200 seconds for 12 confirmations today. Slot times would run 4 to 8 seconds, and running a node would require far less hardware.
Censorship Resistance and Privacy
Censorship resistance would be enforced through FOCIL, a scheme where a committee of validators publishes a list of pending transactions that the next block must contain, enforced by the fork-choice rule to ignore blocks omitting them. Buterin described this as enabling 'guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion.'
Privacy improvements would arrive through multiple mechanisms. General-purpose computation would remain partly private and expensive, while special-purpose applications would gain 'very strong privacy' from zero-knowledge proofs and private account abstraction. Network-layer privacy would be added through onion routing and mixnets.
The Roadmap Ahead
Buterin stated that Hegota, the fork scheduled for next year, is 'likely to be Ethereum's last normal fork.' What follows involves recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, heavily optimized consensus, and quantum-safe measures.
He emphasized that decentralization is becoming an advantage rather than purely a cost, allowing data and computation to happen in parallel. Modern cryptography solves earlier problems with verifying distributed work, with overhead 'decreasing month by month.'
Buterin referenced the Ethereum Foundation's Strawmap, a draft schedule of seven forks through 2029, as the basis for the planned changes, describing it as 'a very important document.'
