vitalik

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released the plan for "The Computer of the Crypto World," stating that the Hegota fork scheduled for next year may be Ethereum's last "regular" fork, with subsequent upgrades introducing recursive STARK, automated formal verification, optimized consensus, and quantum security capabilities.He indicated that Ethereum will transition from a blockchain to a hybrid architecture that integrates modern cryptography. This roadmap aims to shorten transaction finality to 8 to 32 seconds, significantly reduced from the current approximately 200 seconds with 12 confirmations, and will adjust verification, consensus, and block construction mechanisms through PeerDAS, SNARK, and FOCIL.

According to CoinDesk, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has released a long-term roadmap, referred to as Streamlining Ethereum. The vision proposes that by 2030, Ethereum will surpass a mere blockchain ledger and plans to completely restructure the protocol in the next three to four years.The transformation includes expanding transaction throughput by approximately 1000 times, introducing zero-knowledge proofs to enhance privacy and combat quantum computing threats. By 2030, the network is expected to accommodate 2TB of traditional dynamic state data, along with an additional 100TB of new scalable storage, to achieve underlying state separation and optimization. The vision also aims to establish Ethereum as an infrastructure driven by cryptographic validation, with applications extending from finance to social systems. Most developers support this plan, although some voices believe the implementation timeline is somewhat delayed.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced today that the original novel "Snowmoon" has been completed, consisting of 32 chapters.The novel unfolds in a speculative science fiction setting, depicting a world that heavily relies on cryptography and decentralized governance. The story focuses on the ideological conflicts between societies such as Veridia and the Arctic Empire, involving elements like zero-knowledge proofs, second voting, privacy technologies, and content-oriented tax mechanisms, integrating themes of mechanism design and digital sovereignty that have long been of interest to Vitalik.The work is released under the GPL v3 license. Vitalik stated that adaptations into films, animations, and other derivative works are allowed, but requires the related production pipeline (including AI prompts, scripts, and other non-generic materials) to be open-sourced. He declared that all text was written by him, with AI assistance only used for spelling and grammar checks, consistency verification, and webpage formatting, and noted "Snowmoon was written with love."

Vitalik posted on the X platform, stating that he attempted to briefly explain the true meaning of the plans for Ethereum that forked after Hegota. Ethereum is no longer just a blockchain; it is a hybrid architecture that combines blockchain with modern cryptography, enabling more powerful features.Related plans include FOCIL, EIP-8288, streamlined consensus, state management, formal verification, memory pool improvements with privacy features, and long-term obfuscation techniques.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that PeerDAS has been running stably for nearly a year with virtually no issues, which is an "underappreciated achievement" by Ethereum client developers.Vitalik mentioned that PeerDAS is a complex task and is the first large-scale blockchain system case to achieve "consensus on data availability without any single node downloading the complete block," realizing decentralized consensus without the need for complete data replication.

Vitalik posted on the X platform stating that synchronizing an Ethereum node now takes only half a day at the fastest, with aggressive settings allowing disk space usage to be below 0.5 TB.EIP-4444 and the client teams' optimizations for snapshot synchronization have significantly improved the synchronization situation. Glamsterdam will further enhance node synchronization, for example, the new synchronization protocol of Nimbus will adopt relevant improvements.

Vitalik posted on the X platform that a new Solidity compiler has been released.It is reported that the new version, built using Zig, was created to avoid waiting for the long 10-minute Solidity compilation process. While maintaining consistent bytecode generation, the compilation speed for some contracts has increased by more than 5 times. The build time has been reduced from 10 minutes to 2 minutes, and the incremental compilation time for large projects has decreased from 700 seconds to 99 seconds.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated in his opening speech at the 2026 Shanghai Blockchain Week that cryptographic technologies such as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), obfuscation techniques, and iO, which were previously considered far from practical, are making rapid progress. Blockchain will also transition from primarily solving "who can send what assets" to an era where it can programmatically determine "who can see what information."Vitalik cited FOCIL (EIP-7805) as an example, stating that the plan involves 16 validators jointly providing a list of included transactions, reducing the ability of a single block builder to censor or delay transactions. He mentioned that in the next five years, more computations will be performed in parallel on user devices, memory pools, and block building stages, and Ethereum will continue to push for the final confirmation time to be significantly reduced from the current approximately 16 minutes to 8-32 seconds.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, delivered a keynote speech at the 12th Global Blockchain Summit, stating that the blockchain was initially a primary tool. Although it has characteristics such as openness, neutrality, and security, it is not scalable and is completely transparent, lacking privacy protection mechanisms.Subsequently, privacy transactions and scalable verification brought by zero-knowledge proofs have changed this situation and have been transformed from planning into actual EIPs, included in the Ethereum roadmap. Technologies such as fully homomorphic encryption are also beginning to be applied, and indistinguishable obfuscation may also be applied on-chain in the future. Beyond privacy, the parallel construction and proof of blocks can make extreme scalability possible, and industry thinking has shifted from digital assets to digital assets plus information, from purely on-chain to user-end, transaction memory pools, a complete pipeline on-chain, and from who can send what to who can see what.Currently, blockchain has gradually evolved from a simple ledger to a cryptography-based secure computing network. With the development of AI, providing cryptographic rules to AI for automated formal verification can significantly enhance verification efficiency, allowing the chain to carry more possibilities.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to Paradigm Chief Technology Officer Georgios Konstantopoulos's question, "What room is there for the development of privacy from now on?" by stating that only by giving up can privacy truly be considered to be on the path to extinction. I will not give up on privacy; instead, I will further strengthen it.Earlier reports indicated that Vitalik updated the Ethereum roadmap in August, with quantum security, privacy protection, and native Rollups becoming future focuses.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin stated: As many people are learning about effective altruism, it is worth understanding the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi, who surprisingly approached the original effective altruists (especially those focused on global health rather than those concerned with AI risks).Vitalik noted that Mozi valued two goals: universal love, which means loving everyone and not just oneself or those similar or close to oneself; and the efficient use of limited resources to help people in the most effective way.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin stated that he disagrees with the common view that "AI hackers mean cybersecurity is doomed to fail." He believes that once people clarify their thoughts, cybersecurity naturally leans towards the defensive side, and anyone who continues to hold cryptocurrencies (including himself, with about 90% of his net worth) is implicitly betting on this point.Vitalik stated: If AI can prove the Navier-Stokes equations and Fermat's Last Theorem, it can also prove "this program is secure" as a mathematical theorem, even if the program is very complex. He used the encrypted communication application Signal as an example to illustrate that the definition of "security" is extremely complex, covering forged messages, active interference, server breaches, key leaks, hardware side channels, and more. The definition is smaller and more composable than the attack surface, and verifying whether the definition is sufficient is more feasible than directly scanning the code.He pointed out that historically, failures often occur because only the self-identified critical parts of security are verified while neglecting the rest of the code. Today, the entire program must be verified, including the database, network, and cache layers, which modern AI can achieve. This is not a competition to see who discovers vulnerabilities first, but rather to make the code itself more resilient. Vitalik stated that this is the direction for Ethereum in the coming years; without this step, especially for blockchains with scalability and privacy, there is no future. It is necessary to make the software truly secure, and significant progress has already been made.

Vitalik Buterin stated that the "killer application" of adversarial governance mechanism design theory may ultimately appear in the field of artificial intelligence safety. He believes there is a deep correspondence between governance mechanisms and artificial intelligence safety: both involve how "weaker principals" can achieve ideal outcomes from "stronger agents."In governance scenarios, the principal is a static algorithm, and the agent is a human; in artificial intelligence safety scenarios, the principal is humans and weaker large language models, while the agent is a stronger large language model. Vitalik pointed out that if the degree of collusion among agents can be limited, the system can achieve better outcomes, and this mechanism design conclusion may be transferable to the field of artificial intelligence safety.

Vitalik posted on the X platform, expressing the hope to include the recursive STARK memory pool proposal EIP-8288 in the Ethereum I-star upgrade, stating that it can be seen as the next step after Frames.This proposal allows quantum-safe signature data to be placed off-chain, reducing the cost of signatures; the fuel cost for quantum-safe privacy transactions is also expected to drop from about 10 million to tens of thousands. The proposal relies on frames and recursive STARK aggregated transaction dependencies, with nodes sending a STARK of about 100 to 300KB each time period; the on-chain overhead is one STARK and 96 bytes for each statement to be proven.

Silicon Valley angel investor Liron Shapira posted on X this morning, stating: "I assert (with 50% confidence): due to AI shaking the security and stability guarantees that people once believed Bitcoin had, the price of BTC will plummet more than 50% within the next two years."Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin rebutted this, saying: "I hold the completely opposite view. My fundamental reason is that, in the long run, I am quite optimistic about network security, and I believe the main challenge is how to smoothly transition through the transition period. Moreover, I believe BTC can at least properly handle all issues that do not require social consensus to resolve (for example, upgrading clients, mining pools, etc., to deal with network layer attacks fall into this category). Additionally, I believe the probability of hash algorithms or proof-of-work mechanisms being truly compromised is extremely low. I wanted to make a bet with you, but considering my current asset allocation (I guess you have the same view on Ethereum ETH), I have already staked about 90% of my wealth on this bet."

Vitalik recently updated EIP-8141 "Frame Transaction" proposal, with core improvements including atomic batch execution of up to 64 operations, social recovery (similar to Google account recovery, without the need for a mnemonic phrase), P256 quantum-resistant signatures, and the ability for anyone to pay gas fees for users, significantly enhancing the usability of Ethereum wallets.It is reported that the improvement proposal was co-authored by Vitalik, lightclient, and 10 other experts, and is planned to be included in the 2027 Hegotá upgrade, marking a significant native implementation of Ethereum account abstraction.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the Poseidon hash function series, developed over many years, has generated significant practical value in Ethereum and other fields, and will continue to play a role in the coming years.Modern privacy protocols can quickly generate SNARK proofs on the client side, and Poseidon is one of the important reasons for this. Vitalik pointed out that today's general-purpose STARK has achieved extremely high performance, with the proof overhead for almost any batch computation reduced to three-digit levels, and it is expected to further drop to two-digit levels or even lower in the future, a development that has even exceeded expectations from the early 2020s.