Vitalik Buterin outlines Ethereum's 'cryptographic world computer' plan

Vitalik Buterin outlined an Ethereum redesign that would bring finality in 8 to 32 seconds. The plan describes a hybrid architecture that combines blockchain concepts with cryptographic methods developed through decades of academic work. Buterin said this architecture would enable properties beyond those of a blockchain alone. He wrote about the plan in a post published on Saturday. Buterin said Hegota, scheduled for next year, is likely to be Ethereum's last normal fork. He wrote that the next upgrade would be the last one that someone from 2015 would recognize. The redesign would change how Ethereum verifies transactions. Instead of downloading and re-executing every block, users would sample data with PeerDAS and check a SNARK. The redesign would replace Ethereum's current consensus approach with a more optimized proof-of-stake model. Block construction would shift from one miner deciding what goes into a block to multiple parties building it together. Finality would take 8 to 32 seconds, compared with roughly 200 seconds for 12 confirmations today. Slots would run 4 to 8 seconds. Running a node would require much less hardware. Buterin described FOCIL as a censorship-resistance scheme. Under the scheme, a committee of validators would each publish a list of pending transactions that the next block must contain. The fork-choice rule would enforce those lists by causing blocks that omit them to be ignored. Buterin described the result as guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion. General-purpose computation would remain expensive and only partly private. Special-purpose applications would get very strong privacy through zero-knowledge proofs and private account abstraction. Onion routing and mixnets would provide privacy at the network layer. The Ethereum Foundation resourced this work through a dedicated privacy cluster launched last October. Buterin wrote that the same computation would cost more if developers put it all into one opaque, sequentially executed transaction. It would cost less if developers split it into dependencies that can run in parallel or remove it before the transaction reaches a block. Buterin argued that decentralization is becoming an advantage rather than only a cost. He said decentralization allows data storage and computation inside the mempool to happen in parallel. He also said it allows metadata to be hidden in ways that centralized systems cannot manage. Buterin said this was a goal in the mid-2010s. He said it failed then because there was no way to verify that divided work had been done correctly. He said randomly selected committees were complicated to set up and expensive. He said those committees added latency and offered no recourse if they failed. Buterin said modern cryptography solves the verification problem. He said its overhead is decreasing month by month. Buterin described indistinguishability obfuscation as a future technology that could remove the tradeoff between privacy and generality. He said the plan does not depend on that technology. He said the plan's conclusions would apply long before the technology becomes available. Buterin identified making zero-knowledge proofs fast and safe enough as a nearer-term challenge. He wrote that developers are already optimizing this complexity with AI tools. He said managing and parallelizing access to very large amounts of state remains more difficult and systemically complex. Buterin's post serves as a plain-language companion to the Ethereum Foundation's Strawmap. The Strawmap is a draft schedule of seven forks through 2029. Buterin called it an important document after Justin Drake published it in February. The Strawmap lays out dependencies fork by fork. Buterin's post describes the network's intended destination. That destination includes reducing slot times from 12 seconds to two. It also includes reducing finality from roughly 16 minutes to single digits. The plan would replace the network component by component.