Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a blog post on Sunday laying out how the network's design will evolve by 2030, calling the post-Hegota architecture "a hybrid that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography."

The essay, titled "The cryptographic world computer," recasts Ethereum as more than a distributed ledger. "It's really not just a blockchain anymore," Buterin wrote on X. He framed the network as a merger of "core Satoshian ideas" with cryptographic machinery that "did not even exist (or was not mature) in 2009."

What changes after Hegota?

Hegota, the upgrade planned for 2026, is likely Ethereum's last "normal" fork, Buterin wrote. He listed four priorities for every subsequent upgrade:

• Recursive STARKs, proofs that verify the validity of other proofs
• Automated formal verification, mathematical checks that code behaves as designed
• Highly optimized consensus algorithms
• Quantum-safe cryptography

The shift is part of "Lean Ethereum," a multi-year upgrade arc Buterin described in July as rivaling the 2022 Merge in scope. He said at the time that Lean would replace almost every major piece of the protocol.

Glamsterdam, the upgrade preceding Hegota, will ship in the fourth quarter of 2026, the Ethereum Foundation said earlier this month. Glamsterdam had originally been projected for the first half of 2026.

How does the Bitcoin whitepaper figure in?

Buterin annotated five sections of the Bitcoin whitepaper to illustrate the divergence. Under the post-2030 design, nodes will not re-execute every block. Instead, they will sample data through PeerDAS, a blob-sampling system that shipped in the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, and verify a SNARK. Buterin wrote that PeerDAS will later cover full block contents.

Signatures will aggregate offchain under draft proposal EIP-8288, which Buterin co-authored with Thomas Coratger in June. Only entry nodes will see individual signatures and proofs.

FOCIL, or fork-choice enforced inclusion lists, is a Hegota feature that lets multiple validators, not a single block builder, force valid transactions into blocks. Buterin argued that FOCIL and possible later extensions will much more deeply enshrine multi-participant split-authority block construction.

Privacy protocols that use ZK-SNARKs already break the whitepaper's requirement that transactions be public. Buterin said FOCIL and EIP-8288 will make such transactions much more first-class citizens.

What are the performance targets?

Buterin projected slots of 4 to 8 seconds by 2030 and finality in 8 to 32 seconds. "Ethereum itself will never have latency that competes with servers, but infrastructure built around it could," he wrote.

He also argued that decentralization, long treated as a performance tax, can in "a few limited cases" become a performance asset. A decentralized network allows larger volumes of data to be stored in parallel and lets a high volume of computation happen in parallel, in many cases inside the mempool, Buterin wrote.

Early Ethereum designs tried to split work across committees of randomly selected participants but lacked a way to verify the work. Buterin said modern cryptography has now solved that problem, and the overhead factor is decreasing month by month.

What remains unsolved?

Buterin flagged state management as harder than zero-knowledge efficiency. Parallelizing access to the running record of every account balance and smart contract will require techniques Ethereum has not yet adopted.

He also pointed to indistinguishability obfuscation, a technique that scrambles a program so it can run without revealing its code, as a possible "further shift" if it matures. Buterin called obfuscation cryptography's "final boss" in June.

ETH traded near $2,700 on Sunday, roughly flat over 24 hours, according to The Block's Ethereum Price page. Hegota now sits as the next coordination deadline for client teams, with every subsequent upgrade carrying the cryptographic weight Buterin describes as the post-blockchain phase of the network.