Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Aims to Reduce Final Confirmation Time to 8–32 Seconds Within Five Years

ChainCatcher reports that at the opening keynote of the 2026 Shanghai Blockchain Week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that cryptographic technologies previously considered far from practical—such as FHE (fully homomorphic encryption), obfuscation, and iO—are advancing rapidly. Blockchains will transition from primarily addressing “who can send what asset” to enabling programmable control over “who can see what information.” Vitalik cited FOCIL (EIP-7805) as an example, noting that the proposal plans to have 16 validators jointly provide a transaction inclusion list, reducing the ability of any single block builder to censor or delay transactions. He added that over the next five years, more computation will be parallelized across user devices, mempools, and block building stages, and Ethereum will continue driving the finality time down from the current ~16 minutes to 8–32 seconds.