Vitalik Buterin Says Hegota Will Likely Be Ethereum’s Last ‘Normal’ Fork

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the network’s upgrades will change in kind once Hegota ships next year, with each later fork centered on proofs and other advanced cryptography.

In a blog post published Sunday and shared on X, titled “The cryptographic world computer,” Buterin wrote that Hegota is likely to be the network’s last “normal” fork. “Everything after that involves recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus algorithms, and making it all quantum-safe,” he wrote.

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Buterin argued that a future Ethereum will be called a blockchain “to a large extent for historical reasons.” In practice, he wrote, it will combine Bitcoin’s founding ideas with cryptographic tools drawn from 50 years of academic research, some of which were not mature when Bitcoin launched in 2009.

He annotated the Bitcoin whitepaper section by section. Nodes that now download and re-execute every block would instead sample data through PeerDAS and check a SNARK, a short proof that a computation was done correctly. Blocks built by a single miner or proposer would give way to construction split among multiple parties.

A comparison table in the post puts Ethereum in 2030 at roughly 4 to 8 seconds per slot and 8 to 32 seconds to finality, against about 17 seconds per block and around 200 seconds for 12 confirmations in 2015.

The most important shift, Buterin wrote, is that decentralization is moving from “purely a burden incurred in the name of safety and robustness” to, in limited cases, a source of speed. A spread-out network can store data and run computation in parallel, he said.

Early Ethereum designs tried to split up work this way but could not check each piece was done correctly. “Now, with modern cryptography, this problem is solved, and the overhead factor of that solution is decreasing month by month,” he wrote.

Developers will face new incentives too, since computation crammed into one serial transaction will cost more than work split into parallel pieces.

Making zero-knowledge proofs efficient and safe is hard but “already being heavily optimized with AI tools,” he wrote, while handling huge volumes of state and letting many processes read and write it at once is likely the harder task.

The essay builds on “Lean Ethereum,” the rebuild Buterin has said would take three to four years and rival the Merge in scope, and on the strawmap roadmap Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake introduced in February.

Further out, Buterin said practical program obfuscation could bring “one further shift,” though the essay’s conclusions “will apply long before any of that becomes available.”

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