Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has described a long-term redesign that would turn the network into what he calls a “cryptographic world computer,” combining blockchain technology with advanced cryptographic systems. In a post published on Saturday, Buterin said Ethereum’s next upgrade, the Hegota fork scheduled for next year, is likely to be the last “normal” fork recognizable to people familiar with the network in 2015.
According to Decrypt, the plan beyond Hegota would involve recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, a more efficient proof-of-stake consensus system and protections designed to make Ethereum quantum-safe. Buterin’s argument is that Ethereum is no longer best understood as only a blockchain. Instead, it is becoming a hybrid system that combines ideas associated with Satoshi Nakamoto’s original blockchain design with cryptographic techniques developed during decades of academic research.
The proposed changes would affect how Ethereum verifies transactions, reaches agreement, constructs blocks, protects users’ privacy and handles computation. Buterin presented the direction as a gradual replacement of the network’s components rather than a single transformation.
Faster verification and transaction finality
One of the biggest changes would concern verification. Today, a node can download and re-execute blocks to check that the network is operating correctly. Under the proposed architecture, verification would rely more heavily on data sampling through PeerDAS and checking a SNARK, a type of cryptographic proof.
Consensus would also be redesigned around a more heavily optimized proof-of-stake model. Block construction would move away from a process in which one miner or block producer decides what enters a block. Multiple parties would instead participate in building blocks.
The target is considerably faster confirmation. Buterin outlined finality in roughly eight to 32 seconds, compared with about 200 seconds for 12 confirmations today. The plan also contemplates shorter slots of four to eight seconds. At the same time, running an Ethereum node would require substantially less hardware, according to the proposal.
Censorship resistance is another part of the design. The proposed FOCIL system would have a committee of validators publish lists of pending transactions that the next block would be required to include. The fork-choice rule would reject blocks that leave out those transactions. Buterin characterized this as guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion.
Privacy and a different approach to gas costs
Privacy would be introduced through several technologies rather than one universal feature. General-purpose computation would remain expensive and only partly private, while specialized applications could obtain much stronger privacy through zero-knowledge proofs and private account abstraction.
At the network level, onion routing and mixnets are intended to conceal information about how users connect and communicate. The Ethereum Foundation has already supported work in this area through a dedicated privacy cluster launched last October.
The redesign could also change the economics of computation. Buterin said the same work would become more expensive when placed in a single, opaque, serial transaction. It could become cheaper when divided into dependencies that can run in parallel or when unnecessary work is removed before the transaction is included in a block.
This reflects a broader shift in how Ethereum would use its network. Rather than treating decentralization only as a limitation that creates additional cost and slower processing, the proposed system would use many participants to store data and perform computation in parallel.
Why cryptography is central to the plan
Buterin said earlier attempts to divide work across many participants faced a fundamental problem: there was no reliable way to confirm that each separate task had been completed correctly. Randomly selected committees were difficult and expensive to organize, added latency and provided no clear remedy when a committee failed.
Modern cryptography, in his view, changes that calculation. Cryptographic proofs can allow work to be split up while still making its correctness verifiable. Buterin said the overhead associated with these systems is declining month by month.
A more distant possibility is indistinguishability obfuscation, which he described as a potential “holy grail” because it could remove the trade-off between privacy and general-purpose functionality. However, he stressed that Ethereum’s proposed direction does not depend on this technology and that the plan would remain relevant long before it becomes available.
The nearer-term technical challenges are more practical. Zero-knowledge proofs must become fast and safe enough for widespread use, while access to very large amounts of blockchain state must be managed and parallelized without creating systemic complexity. Buterin said the former is already being optimized with the help of artificial-intelligence tools, while the latter remains more difficult.
The post complements the Ethereum Foundation’s Strawmap, a draft schedule covering seven forks through 2029. While that document sets out planned dependencies from fork to fork, Buterin’s essay describes the eventual destination: shorter slot times, finality reduced from roughly 16 minutes to single-digit minutes in the longer-term roadmap, and a component-by-component rebuilding of Ethereum.
Current market picture
Moneyiar market data at 22:03-22:04 on September 25, 2026, showed Ethereum (ETH) at $2,681.7028821295, down 0.13% over 24 hours but up 2.05% over seven days.
The same Moneyiar data showed:
- Shiba Inu (SHIB) at $0.0000058406, up 0.46% in 24 hours and 6.1% over seven days.
- Uniswap (UNI) at $9.4332270255, up 2.98% in 24 hours and 4.82% over seven days.
- Pepe (PEPE) at $0.0000044327, down 0.06% in 24 hours and up 14.7% over seven days.
The market figures describe prices and recent performance at the stated time; they do not indicate how investors will respond to Ethereum’s proposed technical roadmap.
