Buterin maps Ethereum's path to 2030 in new blog post
The Ethereum co-founder says the Hegota upgrade planned for next year is likely the network's last normal fork before recursive STARKs, formal verification and quantum safety take over.
Key points
- Buterin published the essay, titled 'The cryptographic world computer', on Sunday and shared it in an X post.
- He said Hegota, planned for next year, is likely Ethereum's last 'normal' fork.
- Glamsterdam, the upgrade before Hegota, is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026.
- Buterin projected slots of 4 to 8 seconds and finality in 8 to 32 seconds by 2030.
- ETH traded near $2,700 on Sunday, roughly flat over 24 hours, per The Block's price page.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has set out how the network's architecture will change by 2030 in a blog post published on Sunday, describing a system that blends blockchain design with modern cryptography. In an X post sharing the essay, titled The cryptographic world computer, he wrote that it is really not just a blockchain anymore, according to The Block. He called Ethereum a hybrid architecture that combines blockchains and modern cryptography to enable much more powerful properties.
Buterin said the essay covers basically everything planned for Ethereum from the fork after Hegota, a forthcoming network upgrade. Hegota follows Ethereum's naming convention, combining a Devcon host city, Bogotá, for the execution layer with the name of a star, Heze, for the consensus layer. He wrote that Hegota, the fork planned for next year, is likely to be Ethereum's last normal fork.
Everything after Hegota involves recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimised consensus algorithms and making the network quantum-safe, Buterin wrote, citing the Ethereum Foundation's technical strawmap roadmap. STARKs are cryptographic proofs that a computation was performed correctly, while recursive STARKs prove the validity of other proofs. Automated formal verification uses mathematical proofs to check code, and quantum-safe cryptography is designed to resist future quantum computers.
Hegota and beyond
The upgrade before Hegota, Glamsterdam, is expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2026, according to an Ethereum Foundation post The Block reported on earlier this month. It had initially been projected for the first half of 2026. Buterin also referred to Lean Ethereum, a series of upgrades spanning several years that he said in July would replace almost every major piece of the protocol and rival the Merge, Ethereum's 2022 switch to proof-of-stake, in scope.
In the post, Buterin annotated five sections of the Bitcoin whitepaper to show how Ethereum's design has changed and will change. Rather than downloading and re-executing every block, nodes would sample data through PeerDAS and verify a SNARK, a short proof that a computation was done correctly. PeerDAS, which shipped in the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, lets validators sample blob data instead of downloading it in full, and Buterin wrote it will later cover full block contents.
He wrote that signatures will be aggregated offchain, with a single one onchain per block, under draft proposal EIP-8288, which he co-authored with Thomas Coratger in June. The whitepaper's hidden assumption that one participant makes each block is already heavily degraded in reality, he wrote, adding that FOCIL and possible later extensions will more deeply enshrine multi-participant block construction. FOCIL is a Hegota feature letting multiple validators force valid transactions into blocks.
Annotating the whitepaper
Buterin projected slots of 4 to 8 seconds by 2030 and finality in 8 to 32 seconds, noting that Ethereum itself will never have latency competing with servers but that infrastructure built around it could. He argued decentralisation, long a burden incurred for safety and robustness, can in a few limited cases aid performance by storing and computing in parallel and hiding metadata. He said managing Ethereum's state will likely be harder than making zero-knowledge proofs efficient, and that a further shift could come if indistinguishability obfuscation becomes practical. ETH traded near $2,700 on Sunday, roughly flat over 24 hours, according to The Block's Ethereum Price page.