Key points

• Buterin published a post titled "The cryptographic world computer" describing a network built on proofs and off-chain computation.
• He said the shift would accelerate after Hegotá, the upgrade planned for next year and described as Ethereum's last "normal" fork.
• Proofs would let computers check results faster than repeating the original calculations, while spot checks confirm data stays available.
• The plan also covers privacy for payments, balances and wallet activity, hiding requests that reveal which accounts a user follows.
• Buterin said payments could become final in roughly eight to 32 seconds, but proofs must get cheaper and parallel work must be coordinated.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on Sunday that the network he envisions for 2030 may still be called a blockchain, but it would work very differently from today's version. In a post titled "The cryptographic world computer", he described a system that combines a blockchain with cryptographic proofs and networks of computers working outside it, according to CoinDesk.

Ethereum already lets people send money, trade tokens and borrow through applications that run under shared rules. The difficulty, Buterin argues, is serving more users without making the network too expensive to use or too demanding to check. Today a computer fully checking Ethereum repeats the calculations behind its transactions, confirming for example that a sender had enough funds and that an application followed its rules.

That repetition helps keep the network honest, but it also means adding computers does not automatically raise capacity, because each machine is busy checking much of the same activity. Buterin argues newer cryptographic tools can break that constraint. A computer could process transactions and produce a short mathematical proof that it followed the rules, and other computers could check that proof far faster than repeating the original work. Separate spot checks would help establish that transaction records remained available for inspection.

A different kind of network

Ethereum's developers wanted to distribute work this way a decade ago, Buterin wrote, but struggled to ensure every participant had done its part correctly. He said the missing ingredient was verification. Earlier attempts assigned particular tasks to smaller groups, which added delays and left the wider network struggling to recover if one group failed. Proofs, he argues, let computers work on different tasks at once while still checking one another's results.

Ethereum would still need to settle questions where order matters, such as which of two payments spending the same funds came first. Buterin suggested more of the work behind those payments could be completed beforehand, with proofs combined to reduce the information recorded on the blockchain. His privacy plans also cover information people reveal simply by using a wallet, since checking a balance often means asking an outside server about an address, letting its operator learn which accounts a person follows.

Other crypto developers are pursuing similar goals. Zcash already lets users send payments with encrypted addresses and amounts, and about 4.9 million ZEC sat in its shielded pools on Friday, according to CoinDesk's earlier analysis of ZecStats data. Researchers behind the Shielded Bitcoin paper published on Thursday have proposed borrowing Zcash's payment design for bitcoin, though their specification leaves the deposit and withdrawal mechanism to separate research.

Proofs replace repeated work

Buterin's 2030 comparison still lists cost and privacy limitations for complex applications, and it envisages payments becoming final in roughly eight to 32 seconds. He expects Hegotá, planned for next year, to be Ethereum's last "normal" fork, built with technology familiar to someone working on the network in 2015. Later upgrades would lean increasingly on mathematical proofs, tools that check software for errors and security meant to withstand future quantum computers.

Read the full article on CoinDesk →