Vitalik Buterin Outlines 'Cryptographic World Computer' Plan for Ethereum

What happened

Users would get finality in 8 to 32 seconds, against roughly 200 seconds for 12 confirmations today. Hegota, the fork scheduled for next year, is "likely to be Ethereum's last 'normal' fork," he said.

What follows involves recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, heavily optimized consensus and making the lot quantum-safe. It's a hybrid… — vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 27, 2026 A post-Lean Ethereum is called a blockchain "to a large extent for historical reasons," Buterin wrote.

In reality, he argued, it is a "hybrid construction" merging Satoshi Nakamoto's ideas with cryptographic machinery that came out of 50 years of academic work and "did not even exist" in 2009. Verification, consensus, and block construction Three core properties are being replaced outright.

Verification moves from downloading and re-executing every block to sampling data with PeerDAS and checking a SNARK. Consensus moves to a "much better optimized" proof of stake model.