🔔 Vitalik Unveils Ethereum’s Five-Year Roadmap: Focused on Quantum Resistance, ZK-EVM, and the Ultimate Resilience of the “World Computer” Huoxing Finance reports: On April 20, at the opening day of the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech titled “The Future Direction of the Ethereum Protocol,” systematically outlining Ethereum’s technological evolution over the next five years. Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum’s core mission is not to compete with high-frequency trading platforms, but to become the world’s most secure, decentralized, and always-on “world computer”—a globally shared layer ensuring user self-sovereignty, security, and verifiability. To realize this vision, Vitalik broke down the roadmap into three phases: short-term攻坚 (urgent攻坚), medium-term state optimization, and long-term protocol stabilization—focusing on quantum resistance, zero-knowledge proof verification (ZK-EVM), and protocol resilience. On execution layer scaling, Vitalik stated that short-term scaling will be achieved through aggressive optimizations via multiple EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), including the introduction of block-level access lists to enable transaction parallelization, recalibration of the gas pricing mechanism, and implementation of ePBS (execution proposer-block separation) to allow longer but more efficient block validation. Improvements in node state synchronization will also significantly enhance download efficiency. Vitalik particularly highlighted the importance of EIP-8141 (Account Abstraction). This proposal redefines transactions as a sequence of calls, natively supporting smart contract wallets, gas fee sponsorship, and more complex privacy protocols at the protocol level. Regarding quantum resistance, Vitalik noted that while quantum-resistant signature algorithms have existed for two decades, their main bottleneck lies in efficiency: current quantum-resistant signatures are 2–3 KB in size (compared to today’s 64 bytes) and consume approximately 200,000 gas on-chain (vs. today’s 3,000). Solutions will leverage hash-based signatures and optimized “lattice + vectorized” approaches to drastically reduce resource overhead while maintaining security. Vitalik emphasized that state layer scaling represents the more challenging “deep water.” The medium-term roadmap will focus on optimizing the state tree and exploring alternatives that do not require permanently storing all historical state, to curb infinite state bloat. Looking further ahead, Vitalik expects ZK-EVM to become the primary method for verifying the Ethereum chain by around 2028, enabling single-slot finality within 10–20 seconds—allowing lightweight devices like smartphones to independently verify on-chain data. https://t.co/LBFyCnjNez