Ethereum's last fork anyone from 2015 would recognize, per Vitalik 🪞

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network's Hegotá fork, planned for 2027, will likely be the final upgrade "whose features and technology would still be recognizable to someone familiar with Ethereum in 2015," after which development will pivot to recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, optimized consensus and quantum-safe cryptography. In a post on Sunday and a follow-up thread on Saturday, Buterin described the transition as Ethereum's evolution from a blockchain into what he called a "cryptographic world computer," combining onchain settlement with cryptographic verification, privacy features and decentralized offchain components. "It's really not just a blockchain anymore. It's a hybrid…," he wrote, arguing the architecture will "enable much more powerful properties" than blockchain alone.

Buterin pointed to PeerDAS, which lets nodes confirm data availability by sampling portions of data rather than downloading entire blocks, as the starting point of that shift, alongside verification based on sampling data with PeerDAS and checking a SNARK. Under the post-Lean Ethereum roadmap, consensus would move to a "much better optimized" proof of stake model, and block construction would shift from a single miner selecting transactions to multiple parties building blocks together. Finality would arrive in 8 to 32 seconds, compared with roughly 200 seconds for 12 confirmations today, slots would run 4 to 8 seconds, and node hardware requirements would drop significantly. Censorship resistance would rely on FOCIL, a system in which a committee of validators each publishes a list of pending transactions the next block must include, with the fork-choice rule ignoring blocks that omit them, yielding what Buterin called "guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion."

Privacy is expected to arrive in stages, with general-purpose computation remaining costly and only partly private while specific applications get "very strong privacy" from zero-knowledge proofs and private account abstraction. Network-layer privacy would come from onion routing and mixnets, work supported by a dedicated Ethereum Foundation privacy cluster launched last October. Buterin also said on Wednesday that he hopes to see a proposal cutting the cost of quantum-safe private transactions by more than 99% included in a future upgrade. EIP-8288, which he co-authored in June, would move the heaviest post-quantum cryptography out of the execution path, since post-quantum signatures currently run to 2 or 3 kilobytes and cost 150,000 to 200,000 gas to verify.

The discussion prompted debate over how much computation and state should move offchain. Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot said moving computation offchain while committing to and proving results onchain could meaningfully reduce network workload and enable lighter nodes, but argued a "world computer" should still keep records its applications depend on directly onchain so users can see what is happening and interact without external intermediaries. Pseudonymous commentator Cryptographic said the model could expand decentralized finance by letting more complex computation, such as collateral analysis, liquidation routing or borrower-lender matching, occur offchain before Ethereum verifies and settles the outcome. Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro questioned demand for proof-based systems, noting that many existing financial services rely on reputation, regulation and legal enforcement rather than continuous cryptographic verification. Buterin has separately shared priorities for a new "Lean Ethereum" strawmap as the network prepares for what he frames as its most ambitious architectural shift since launch.