[News] Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article on Saturday titled " The cryptographic world computer ", outlining what he believes will be the development direction of the network over the next decade.
Buterin believes that Ethereum is already a hybrid of blockchain and modern cryptography, and it is only called a blockchain for "historical reasons."
He wrote that the next upgrade of Ethereum will be the last one that people will be able to recognize since 2015. Buterin indicates that the fork planned for next year, Hegota, “is very likely to be Ethereum’s last ‘normal’ fork.” After that, the roadmap will include recursive STARK, automated formal verification, a highly optimized consensus mechanism, and making the entire system resistant to quantum attacks.
Buterin wrote on X: “The cryptographic world computer : https :// t.co / ueayODeUPo I tried to express in a relatively concise way the true meaning of almost everything that has happened on Ethereum since the fork after Hegota. It’s really no longer just a blockchain. It’s a hybrid…”
Buterin writes that, to a large extent, blockchain is still referred to as such by Lean Ethereum, "mainly for historical reasons."
In his view, essentially, it is a “hybrid structure” that combines Satoshi Nakamoto’s ideas with cryptographic tools developed over 50 years of academic research, which “did not even exist” in 2009. He stated in a tweet that this architecture will “bring properties that are much more powerful than those of a simple blockchain.”
Verification, Consensus, and Block Construction
Buterin says that three core attributes will be completely replaced. Verification will shift from downloading and re-executing each block to sampling data through PeerDAS and checking SNARK. Consensus will move towards a “much more optimized” proof-of-stake model. Block construction will also change from being determined by a single miner to being built jointly by multiple participants.
He stated that the finalization time will be reduced from about 200 seconds, which currently requires around 12 confirmations, to between 8 and 32 seconds; the slot time will be between 4 and 8 seconds, and much less hardware will be required for the running nodes. The resistance to censorship will come from FOCIL: in this scheme, a committee composed of verifiers each publishes a list of pending transactions that the next block must contain, and these lists are enforced by the fork selection rules; therefore, blocks that ignore these transactions will be considered invalid. Buterin describes this as "guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion."
Privacy will be implemented in phases. General-purpose computing will still be expensive and only partially private, while applications for specific purposes will achieve “very strong privacy” with the help of zero-knowledge proofs and private account abstractions. Onion routing and coin mixing networks will cover the network layer; the Ethereum Foundation launched a dedicated privacy team last October to support this work.
Developers will notice changes in the cost of gas. Buterin writes that if "everything is packed into a single, difficult-to-understand, serial transaction," the same computation will be more expensive; however, if it is broken down into parallelizable dependencies or if these dependencies are separated before the transaction enters the block, the cost will be lower.
Decentralization as an advantage
Buterin believes that decentralization is no longer just about cost. It allows data to be stored in parallel, and computations to occur concurrently within mempool, while also enabling the concealment of metadata in a way that centralized systems cannot achieve.
He said that this was precisely the dream of the mid-2010s, but there was only one reason for the failure at that time: there was no way to verify whether the split work was truly completed correctly. The randomly selected committee was “complicated to set up and costly,” which would increase delays, and “if the committee failed, there was no remedy.” Modern cryptography has solved this problem, and its overhead is “decreasing month by month.”
Further ahead, it becomes indistinguishable and confusing ( indistinguishability obfuscation ). Buterin describes it as the “Holy Grail” because it would completely eliminate the trade-off between privacy and universality. However, he made it clear that no conclusions in this article depend on it, and that “all the conclusions in this article will hold true long before this technology is actually available.”
The more proximate and thus more challenging problem is relatively straightforward: making zero-knowledge proofs fast enough and secure enough, which falls within the realm of "encapsulating complexity" that has already been optimized using the AI tools, he writes; whereas managing and parallelizing access to massive amounts of state is "more difficult and more complex at the system level."
This article reads like a simplified version of the Ethereum Foundation’s roadmap. The foundation plans to launch seven forks by 2029; when this document was released in February, it was described as “a very important document.” If the list in Strawmap outlines the dependencies for each fork, then the article in Buterin points to the ultimate goal: the time required to complete a fork has been reduced from 12 seconds to 2 seconds, and the finalization time has been reduced from about 16 minutes to just a few minutes. The entire network, like “Thessalus’s ship,” is being rebuilt by replacing each component one by one.
