Vitalik Buterin Says Hegota Will Be Ethereum's Last 'Normal' Fork

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says the network's next hard fork, Hegota, is likely to be the last upgrade that looks like the ones that came before it. In an essay published on Sunday, Buterin wrote that Hegota, "the fork planned for next year," is "likely to be Ethereum's last 'normal' fork, with features and technology that would be recognizable to someone in 2015." Everything after it, he wrote, "involves recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus algorithms, and making it all quantum-safe."

Buterin describes the destination as a "cryptographic world computer", an architecture that combines a blockchain with cryptographic privacy and verification and decentralised off-chain components. The goal, he wrote, is "much more cheap, scalable and private high-security computation" than earlier technology could deliver.

The essay compares Ethereum's design in 2015 with where Buterin expects it to be in 2030. The biggest change is in how nodes check the chain. Today a node downloads each block and re-executes it; in the future design it samples data through PeerDAS and verifies a SNARK proof that the block was executed correctly. That would let light clients verify both data availability and computation directly, instead of trusting full nodes.

Consensus would move to a proof-of-stake design with "few-slot finality", with slots of around four to eight seconds and finality in roughly eight to 32 seconds, against the roughly 17-second blocks and 200-second confirmation window of Ethereum's 2015 design. Block construction would shift from a single proposer to a multi-party process, with FOCIL (fork-choice enforced inclusion lists) providing what Buterin calls "guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion" as a defence against censorship. Transactions would pass through a mempool with strong privacy properties, and zero-knowledge proofs combined with private account abstraction would extend privacy to accounts as well as individual transactions.

Buterin argues this changes the role decentralisation plays. Running computation across many independent nodes has usually been treated as a cost paid for security, and he writes that it is "shifting from being purely a burden incurred in the name of safety and robustness to at least sometimes being a strength even from a performance perspective." He adds that a network like the post-Lean-upgrade Ethereum is called a blockchain "to a large extent for historical reasons."

The essay did not commit to specific dates. Much of what it describes, including real-time proving of Ethereum blocks and quantum-safe signature schemes, is still in research or early implementation, and each component will have to go through Ethereum's core developer process.