Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin reveals the disruption planned for 2027

Vitalik Buterin believes that Hegota, the Ethereum fork planned for 2027, could be the last update based on technologies familiar to developers from 2015. The network will not stop evolving after that. Its future transformations will rely more on cryptographic proofs, parallel execution and formal verification.

Hegota would open a new era for Ethereum

In an essay published on September 27, Vitalik Buterin presents Ethereum as a system that gradually goes beyond its function as a distributed ledger. “It’s really not just a blockchain anymore”he also declared on X, while detailing his vision of the network by 2030.

The co-founder of Ethereum considered Hegota as the probable last fork ” normal “. This expression designates an update whose components would remain recognizable to a developer present at the launch of the network. It therefore does not mean that Hegota will be the ultimate evolution of the protocol.

This distinction allows us to summarize the main changes announced:

• Hegota remains scheduled for 2027 according to the roadmap cited by Buterin;
• Subsequent updates should employ recursive STARK proofs;
• Automated formal verification will take a more important place;
• Consensus will need to become more efficient and resist future quantum threats.

Hegota’s final content is not yet fully locked. The Ethereum Foundation had established a process separating the selection of main features, called headlinersand that of secondary improvements. Each proposal must be evaluated according to its usefulness, maturity and technical risks.

Cryptographic proofs must replace repeated calculations

Today, computers that fully verify Ethereum replicate the calculations contained in transactions. This repetition increases security, but limits the gains obtained when new machines join the network: several participants perform essentially the same work.

Buterin wants to replace part of this mechanics with cryptographic proofs. A computer would perform a calculation, then produce a short mathematical proof. The other participants could check this proof without starting the whole operation again.

“At the time, this approach was not viable for one main reason: the missing ingredient was verification”, writing-he about the first attempts to distribute work. Committees used in old models increased costs, time and risk of failure. Zero-knowledge proofs must now fulfill this role more effectively.

This architecture would allow several machines to process different tasks simultaneously. Ethereum would keep operations requiring a common order on its core layer, such as two transactions seeking to spend the same funds.

Applications will need to better organize their calculations

This development would also change the way applications are built. A program grouping all its operations into a sequential transaction could become more expensive than one capable of separating its calculations into independent tasks.

Developers would thus be encouraged to aggregate signatures or proofs before registering them in a block. Only state changes requiring precise classification would be directly processed by the blockchain. The rest could be executed outside of it and then verified cryptographically.

For Buterin, decentralization would then no longer constitute only a constraint accepted in the name of security. It would also allow more data to be stored and calculations to be distributed among several participants. It could even improve confidentiality by hiding the origin of certain requests.

The vision for 2030 remains faced with several obstacles

Buterin envisions finality between eight and 32 seconds, lighter nodes, and better guarantees of transaction inclusion. Privacy would also cover data indirectly revealed when a wallet queries a server to check its balance. These objectives describe however a future architecture, not the current performance of Ethereum.

Several difficulties remain to be resolved. Zero-knowledge proofs must become less expensive and secure enough to be used on a large scale. The network must also coordinate parallel access to the large amounts of data retained by applications.

Buterin finally recognizes a structural limit: “Ethereum itself will never have latency comparable to servers, but the infrastructure built around it could”. Hegota will therefore not mark the end of Ethereum forks, but the transition to a much more cryptographic, experimental and complex generation of updates.