[News Brief] Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article on Saturday titled "The Cryptographic World Computer," outlining his vision for the next decade of the web.
Buterin believes that Ethereum is already a hybrid of blockchain and modern cryptography, but is called a blockchain only due to "historical reasons."
He wrote that Ethereum's next upgrade will be the last one people will still recognize since 2015. Buterin stated that the fork planned for next year, Hegema, "is likely to be Ethereum's last 'normal' fork." After that, the roadmap will include recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus mechanisms, and making the entire system quantum-resistant.
Buterin wrote on X: "The cryptographic world computer: https://t.co/ueayODeUPo I tried to express, in relatively concise terms, the true meaning of nearly everything planned to happen on Ethereum since the Hegema fork. It’s no longer just a blockchain. It’s a hybrid..."
Buterin wrote that post-Lean Ethereum is still largely called a blockchain, "primarily for historical reasons."
He believes that, at its core, it is a "hybrid structure" that combines Satoshi's ideas with cryptographic tools developed over 50 years of academic research—tools that "didn't even exist" in 2009. In his tweet, he stated that this architecture will "bring properties far stronger than those of a simple blockchain."
Verification, Consensus, and Block Construction
Buterin said that three core properties will be completely replaced. Verification will shift from downloading and re-executing every block to sampling data via PeerDAS and checking SNARKs. Consensus will transition to a “much more optimized” proof-of-stake model. Block construction will move from being determined by a single miner to being collaboratively built by multiple participants.
He stated that finality will be reduced from approximately 200 seconds, currently requiring about 12 confirmations, to between 8 and 32 seconds; slot times will operate between 4 and 8 seconds, and the hardware required to run nodes will be significantly less. Resistance to censorship will come from FOCIL: under this scheme, a committee of validators each publishes a list of pending transactions that must be included in the next block, enforced by the fork choice rule, so blocks that ignore these transactions are considered invalid. Buterin described this as “guaranteed real-time transaction inclusion.”
Privacy will arrive in phases. General-purpose computing will remain expensive and only partially private, while specific-use applications will achieve "strong privacy" through zero-knowledge proofs and private account abstraction. Onion routing and mixing networks will cover the network layer; the Ethereum Foundation launched a dedicated privacy team last October to support this work.
Developers will feel changes in gas costs. Buterin wrote that if "everything is stuffed into a single, hard-to-understand, sequentially executed transaction," the same computation would be more expensive; if it is broken down into parallelizable dependencies or剥离 before the transaction enters a block, the cost would be lower.
Decentralization as an Advantage
Buterin believes that decentralization is no longer just a cost—it enables parallel data storage, parallel computation in the mempool, and metadata hiding in ways that centralized systems cannot achieve.
He said this was precisely the dream of the mid-2010s, but the only reason it failed back then was the inability to verify whether the split work had been correctly completed. Randomly sampled committees were “complex and costly to set up,” increased latency, and “there was no remedy if the committee failed.” Modern cryptography has solved this problem, and its overhead is “declining month by month.”
Next is indistinguishability obfuscation. Buterin describes it as the “holy grail,” as it would completely eliminate the trade-off between privacy and fungibility. However, he explicitly states that none of the conclusions in this article depend on it, and “all conclusions in this paper will hold long before this technology becomes practically usable.”
A more immediate and thorny but relatively mundane issue is making zero-knowledge proofs fast and secure enough—this falls under “encapsulating complexity,” which is already being optimized using AI tools, he wrote; while managing and parallelizing access to massive states is “more difficult and more complex at the system level.”
This article reads like a simplified explanation of the Ethereum Foundation’s Strawmap. Strawmap is the foundation’s roadmap outlining seven planned forks before 2029; when Justin Drake released the document in February, Buterin called it “a very important document.” While Strawmap lists dependencies sequentially by fork, Buterin’s article points to the final destination: slot time reduced from 12 seconds to 2 seconds, finality lowered from about 16 minutes to single-digit minutes, and the entire network gradually rebuilt component by component, like the Ship of Theseus.