'It's really not just a blockchain anymore': Vitalik Buterin maps Ethereum's path to 2030

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin laid out how Ethereum's (ETH) architecture will change by 2030 in a blog post published Sunday, describing a network that combines blockchain design with modern cryptography.

"It's really not just a blockchain anymore," Buterin wrote in an X post sharing the essay, titled "The cryptographic world computer." He called Ethereum "a hybrid architecture that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography, to enable much more powerful properties."

Buterin said the essay explains "basically everything planned to happen to Ethereum starting from the fork after Hegota," a forthcoming network upgrade. Hegota, like earlier Ethereum upgrades, was named by combining a Devcon host city (Bogotá), representing the execution layer, with the name of a star (Heze), representing the consensus layer. 

In the post, Buterin wrote that a modern cryptographic network like the post-Lean-upgrade Ethereum "is called a 'blockchain' to a large extent for historical reasons." It merges "core Satoshian ideas" with powerful new cryptographic machinery that "did not even exist (or was not mature) in 2009," he wrote.

"Lean Ethereum" refers to a series of upgrades spanning multiple years that Buterin 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.

Hegota and beyond

Citing the Ethereum Foundation's technical "strawmap" roadmap, Buterin wrote that Hegota, "the fork planned for next year," is likely to be Ethereum's last "normal" fork. Everything after it "involves recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus algorithms, and making it all quantum-safe," he wrote.

STARKs, or scalable transparent arguments of knowledge, are cryptographic proofs that a computation was performed correctly, with recursive STARKs proving the validity of other proofs. Automated formal verification uses mathematical proofs to check that code does what it is designed to do, and quantum-safe cryptography is designed to resist attacks from future quantum computers.

Glamsterdam, the upgrade before Hegota, is expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2026, according to an Ethereum Foundation post The Block reported on earlier this month. Initially, Glamsterdam (Gloas plus Amsterdam) was projected to land in the first half of 2026.

Annotating the Bitcoin whitepaper

Buterin, in his post, marked up five sections of the Bitcoin whitepaper to show how Ethereum's design has changed and will change by 2030.

Instead of downloading and re-executing every block, for example, nodes would sample data through PeerDAS and verify a SNARK, or a succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge, a short cryptographic proof that a computation was done correctly, according to the post. PeerDAS, which shipped in Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, lets validators sample blob data rather than download it in full. Buterin wrote that it "later will cover full block contents."

Buterin wrote that signatures "will be aggregated offchain, a single one onchain per block." Under EIP-8288, a draft proposal he co-authored with Thomas Coratger in June, "only entry nodes see individual signatures and proofs," according to one annotation.

He wrote that the whitepaper's "hidden assumption" that one participant makes each block is "already heavily degraded in reality." FOCIL "and possible later extensions will much more deeply enshrine multi-participant split-authority block construction," Buterin wrote. FOCIL, or fork-choice enforced inclusion lists, is a Hegota feature that lets multiple validators, rather than a single block builder, force valid transactions into blocks.

Privacy protocols that use ZK-SNARKs, zero-knowledge versions of SNARKs that also keep the underlying data hidden, already break the whitepaper's requirement that all transactions be announced publicly. "FOCIL and EIP-8288 will make such transactions much more first-class citizens," Buterin wrote.

Buterin projected slots, the intervals in which new blocks are proposed, of 4 to 8 seconds by 2030, and finality, the point after which a block cannot be reversed, in 8 to 32 seconds.

"Ethereum itself will never have latency that competes with servers, but infrastructure built around it could," he wrote.

Decentralization to boost performance

Buterin wrote that decentralization, long "a burden incurred in the name of safety and robustness," can in "a few limited cases" be a strength for performance. 

"The decentralized network allows larger volumes of data to be stored in parallel. It allows a high volume of computation to happen in parallel, in many cases inside the mempool," Buterin wrote. "In a few cases, it increases privacy, because only decentralized networks can effectively hide metadata (eg. where data and requests are coming from)." (Emphasis in original.)

Early Ethereum designs tried to split work across committees made up of randomly selected participants but the network had no good way to verify that work, according to the post. "Now, with modern cryptography, this problem is solved, and the overhead factor of that solution is decreasing month by month," Buterin wrote.

Open problems

Buterin wrote that managing and parallelizing access to very large amounts of Ethereum's state, or the running record of every account balance and smart contract's data, will likely be harder than making zero-knowledge proofs efficient and safe.

He said Ethereum could later go through "one further shift" if indistinguishability obfuscation, a technique for scrambling a program so it can run without revealing its code, becomes practical. Buterin called obfuscation cryptography's "final boss" in June, and wrote Sunday that "all of the conclusions in this post will apply long before any of that becomes available."

ETH traded near $2,700 on Sunday, roughly flat over 24 hours, according to The Block's Ethereum Price page.