Key points

• Buterin published the post, titled The cryptographic world computer, on Saturday.
• Hegota, due next year, is described as likely to be Ethereum's last normal fork.
• Finality would fall to 8 to 32 seconds, against roughly 200 seconds for 12 confirmations today.
• FOCIL would let a validator committee force blocks to include listed pending transactions.
• The post follows the Strawmap, the Ethereum Foundation's draft schedule of seven forks through 2029.

Vitalik Buterin has published a plan for Ethereum that he calls the cryptographic world computer, setting out what he sees as the network's next decade. The Ethereum co-founder argues the network is already a hybrid of blockchain and modern cryptography, and is called a blockchain largely for historical reasons. His post appeared on Saturday and was summarised by Decrypt.

Buterin wrote that Hegota, the fork scheduled for next year, is likely to be Ethereum's last normal fork. What follows would involve recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, a heavily optimised consensus model and making the whole system quantum-safe. A post-Lean Ethereum, he argued, merges Satoshi Nakamoto's ideas with cryptographic machinery from 50 years of academic work that did not exist in 2009.

Three core properties would be replaced outright. Verification would move from downloading and re-executing every block to sampling data with PeerDAS and checking a SNARK. Consensus would shift to a much better optimised proof of stake model. Block construction would move from a single miner deciding what goes in to multiple parties building blocks together.

A hybrid network

The changes would be felt in speed and hardware. Finality would arrive in 8 to 32 seconds, against roughly 200 seconds for 12 confirmations today, while slots would run 4 to 8 seconds and running a node would demand far less equipment. 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 blocks omitting them are ignored. Buterin described the result as guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion.

Privacy would arrive in pieces. General-purpose computation would remain expensive and only partly private, while special-purpose applications would 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 also see gas costs change, with the same computation costing more if pushed into one inscrutable serially executed transaction and less if split into parallel dependencies.

Buterin argued that decentralisation is ceasing to be purely a cost. It allows data to be stored in parallel, computation to happen in parallel inside the mempool, and metadata to be hidden in ways a centralised system cannot manage. That was the mid-2010s dream, he said, and it failed because there was no way to verify that split-up work had been done correctly. Committees sampled at random were complicated and expensive to set up, added latency and offered no recourse if they failed. Modern cryptography solves this, with overhead decreasing month by month.

Faster finality and inclusion

Further out sits indistinguishability obfuscation, which Buterin calls the holy grail because it would remove the tradeoff between privacy and generality. He is explicit that nothing in the post depends on it. The harder near-term problem is making zero-knowledge proofs fast and safe enough, which he describes as encapsulated complexity already being optimised with AI tools, while managing and parallelising access to very large amounts of state remains more difficult and systemically complex. The post reads as a companion to the Strawmap, the Ethereum Foundation's draft schedule of seven forks through 2029.

Read the full article on Decrypt →