Vitalik Buterin says next year's Hegota is likely Ethereum's last normal fork

Vitalik Buterin said next year's Hegota is likely to be Ethereum's last normal fork. He placed Hegota in the schedule using the Strawmap, a draft long-term Ethereum roadmap. He said work after Hegota would involve recursive STARKs. He also named automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus, and quantum safety as areas for that later work. Recursive STARKs and quantum-resistant cryptography were also central to the Lean Ethereum plan he outlined earlier this year. Hegota remains in early planning. Ethereum.org lists Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists and frame transactions as scheduled changes for the upgrade. Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists would let a committee of validators propose transaction lists that block builders must honor. Frame transactions would let each account run its own verification logic. Frame transactions would also let accounts choose quantum-resistant signatures. Buterin wrote that Ethereum would carry the blockchain label largely for historical reasons after its Lean upgrades. He argued that nearly every core property of a blockchain has changed or soon will. Under the 2010 model, nodes downloaded and re-executed every block. By 2030, he expects nodes to verify a cryptographic proof and use Peer Data Availability Sampling. Buterin's targets include slots of roughly 4 to 8 seconds. His targets include finality within about 8 to 32 seconds. Ethereum in 2015 needed about 200 seconds to reach 12 confirmations. Buterin argued that decentralization could improve performance in a few limited cases. He noted that a decentralized network can store data and run computation in parallel. Buterin acknowledged that zero-knowledge proofs remain difficult to make efficient and safe. He said artificial intelligence tools already help optimize those proofs. He added that managing access to very large amounts of state would likely be the harder challenge. Glamsterdam is expected to come before Hegota. Its Sepolia testnet fork is tentatively scheduled for October 6. Ethereum.org lists Glamsterdam's mainnet launch for the fourth quarter of 2026, with no confirmed date.