Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has signaled that the network's planned Hegotá upgrade, expected in 2027, may be the last "normal" fork in Ethereum's history. In an essay published on Sunday, Buterin wrote that Hegotá is likely to be Ethereum's last upgrade "with features and technology that would be recognizable to someone in 2015."
According to Buterin, everything after Hegotá will involve a broader technical shift toward what he calls a "cryptographic world computer." The future architecture combines a blockchain with cryptographic privacy and verification and decentralized off-chain components, aiming for much cheaper, scalable and private high-security computation. Key elements include recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus algorithms, and making the network quantum-safe.
The essay contrasts Ethereum's 2015 design with the expected 2030 architecture. Nodes would no longer download and re-execute every block; instead, they would sample data through PeerDAS and verify SNARK proofs that blocks were executed correctly. Light clients could verify data availability and computation directly. Consensus would move to proof-of-stake with few-slot finality, using slots of around four to eight seconds and finality in roughly eight to 32 seconds. Block construction would shift to a multi-party process with FOCIL providing guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion as a censorship defense. A private mempool and zero-knowledge proofs combined with private account abstraction would extend privacy to accounts and transactions.
Buterin also argued that decentralization's role is changing, moving from a burden incurred for safety to sometimes being a performance strength. He noted that after the post-Lean upgrade, Ethereum is called a blockchain "to a large extent for historical reasons." He did not commit to specific dates, and much of the described technology remains in research or early implementation. Any cryptographic transition would require careful planning because Ethereum supports a large ecosystem of wallets, applications and smart contracts.
