One of the co-founders of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has outlined how Ethereum could change after the Hegota fork, arguing that the network is moving toward a “cryptographic world computer” rather than remaining a conventional blockchain.
His roadmap would change how Ethereum verifies transactions, handles computation, and uses its decentralized network, with zero-knowledge proofs taking a much larger role by 2030.
What Changes After Hegotá
Buterin started by comparing Ethereum’s future with the way early blockchains worked. In Bitcoin’s original model, every participant downloaded a block, checked it, and re-executed its transactions, and Ethereum still works broadly along those lines, but the developer sees that changing as the network adopts more advanced cryptography.
By 2030, he expects verification to move toward PeerDAS, where participants can check samples of the data, combined with SNARKs, which let the network verify that a large amount of computation was done correctly without repeating all of it.
The same shift is already visible in consensus, which has moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and is now heading toward a more efficient version of PoS. Block production could also involve several participants instead of one party building the entire block.
He pointed to upgrades like FOCIL, EIP-8288, Lean consensus, formal verification, and changes to Ethereum’s mempool as part of a system designed to rely more heavily on proofs and distributed processing. Another major piece is state management, because Ethereum will need to handle access to a much larger amount of information without making every participant do all the same work.
The changes could also affect how developers build applications, with the 32-year-old arguing that Ethereum will increasingly favor computation that can be broken into smaller pieces and handled separately, rather than putting everything into one large transaction. As such, developers could keep the information the network needs to record directly on-chain while doing other work before it reaches the final block.
That would give decentralization a different role. Instead of being mainly a cost accepted for security, a distributed network could sometimes help Ethereum process more data and computation at the same time. Buterin wrote that the network could “decentralize not just for robustness but also to increase scale,” something those building it had hoped to achieve as early as the mid-2010s.
He expects Hegotá, planned for next year, to be Ethereum’s last “normal” fork, after which recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, more efficient consensus and quantum-safe technology would become part of the longer-term roadmap.
Meanwhile, in the Market
ETH reclaimed its 200-day moving average and was rejected near $2,800 last week, a level analyst Daan Crypto Trades called a major obstacle.
The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap was trading near $2,700 at the time of writing, down nearly 2.5% in 24 hours and about 2% in one week. Still, it had gone up almost 5% over 14 days and 8% in the previous 30 days, while staying about 34% lower than a year ago and roughly 47% below its all-time high near $4,950.
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