Hegotá might be Ethereum's last fork you can still recognize 😳

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network's planned Hegotá upgrade, targeted for 2027, is likely to be the final "normal" fork before Ethereum's development shifts toward recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, optimized consensus and quantum-safe cryptography. In a Sunday post, Buterin said Hegotá's features and technology would still be recognizable to someone familiar with Ethereum in 2015, framing it as the end of an era for traditional upgrades. He identified PeerDAS, which lets nodes verify data availability by sampling portions of data rather than downloading everything, as the moment Ethereum began transitioning "from being just a blockchain to being something much more powerful." Buterin described the longer-term shift as Ethereum's evolution into a "cryptographic world computer," moving beyond a model in which nodes simply download and re-execute transactions toward an architecture combining blockchains with cryptographic verification, privacy and decentralized offchain components.

The proposal could reshape how Ethereum applications are built by moving more computation offchain while using the base layer to verify results, settle transactions and preserve access to shared onchain state. Buterin's post prompted discussion over how much computation and state should ultimately move offchain, and what Ethereum itself should continue to handle directly. Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot said moving computation offchain while committing to and proving the results onchain could significantly reduce the work required from the network and enable lighter nodes. Monnot argued that a "world computer" should still keep important records that its applications depend on directly onchain, letting users see what is happening and interact with applications without relying on external servers or intermediaries.

Pseudonymous commentator Cryptographic said the architecture could expand what decentralized finance (DeFi) applications can do by allowing more complex computation to occur outside smart contracts while Ethereum verifies that resulting transactions comply with protocol rules, pointing to DeFi lending, where collateral analysis, liquidation routing or matching borrowers and lenders could happen offchain before Ethereum verifies and settles the outcome. Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro questioned how much demand exists for proof-based systems compared with traditional trust-based models, noting that many existing financial services rely on reputation, regulation and legal enforcement rather than continuous cryptographic verification. Buterin has previously outlined priorities for a new "Lean Ethereum" strawmap, and has said he believes AI-assisted tools can help expand the use of formal verification across the network.