Vitalik Buterin: blockchains are entering a new computing era At the Global Blockchain Summit (Shanghai Blockchain Week), Vitalik Buterin laid out how ZK proofs, formal verification and AI are about to reshape blockchain architecture. His core point: the old model — where every node re-executes the same computation — is being phased out. With SNARKs/STARKs, one party computes and proves, everyone else just verifies. Recursive STARKs (tied to his EIP-8288 proposal) could bundle many proofs into one, cutting on-chain data and cost. Combined with EIP-8141 (splitting transactions into parallelizable actions) and FOCIL (decentralized block-building), the goal is a full compute pipeline — from local device execution to mempools, proof aggregation, L2s and L1 — that scales without sacrificing decentralization. On AI, Buterin sees it as essential infrastructure for the next stage: writing/auditing code, generating specs, and running formal verification at a scale humans can't match manually — which he says is key to fixing today's L2 security gaps. He's calling on developers to stop designing for a world where advanced crypto and automated verification weren't practical — because that constraint is disappearing fast. #Ethereum #Buterin #ZKProofs #Blockchain #Web3 #AI #Crypto