Vitalik interprets the evolution of Ethereum from traditional ledgers to computers in the cryptographic world, analyzes underlying changes such as PoS, ZK proof and PeerDAS, looks forward to the technical route after the Hegota fork, and discusses a new balance paradigm of decentralization, privacy and expansion.
Author: Vitalik Buterin
Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News
Editor's note: This article is a written expanded version of Vitalik's keynote speech at Shanghai Blockchain International Week. On the basis of the speech, the author added a large number of comparative deductions and technical tables, systematically explaining Ethereum's evolution from a traditional ledger to a "cryptographic world computer", analyzing underlying changes such as PoS, ZK proof, and PeerDAS, looking forward to the technical route after the Hegota fork, and exploring a new balance paradigm of decentralization, privacy, and expansion. (Related reading: Latest judgment from Vitalik Shanghai Summit: The next 15 years of blockchain will enter the era of “blockchain + cryptography”)
We call Ethereum “a blockchain” as if it is essentially the same technology as Bitcoin, which was created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. The two are indeed similar in many aspects. Even the "simplified Ethereum" built in accordance with Strawmap's plan in the future will retain the core characteristics of the blockchain. But at the same time, the technology has evolved dramatically over the past fifteen years and will continue to evolve over the next three. At that point, it would be quite reasonable to call the evolving form of Ethereum a system of a completely different nature.
Today's Ethereum has general computing, a proof-of-stake mechanism, on-chain applications equipped with zero-knowledge proof, and a second-layer network that enables expansion and privacy protection. In the future, Ethereum's computing power can be flexibly adjusted between extreme scalability and complete versatility; it will have a variety of block construction modes with multi-party participation, deeply optimized proof of rights, and zero-knowledge proof will be built into the underlying protocol to assume a core role.
This article will sort out some of the most important fundamental differences between the blockchain of the 2010s and the blockchain of 2030, both at the technical level and at the level of system features available to users.
First, we study the original white paper of Bitcoin section by section and compare its differences with Ethereum, using yellow to represent 2015, green to represent 2025, and blue to represent Ethereum in 2030.
This diagram is adapted from the transaction schematic diagram of Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin paper. It shows the classic chain signature transfer model, and notes that the new scheme can aggregate signatures off-chain, only submit a single record on the chain, and often use zero-knowledge proofs to replace traditional signatures.
This picture compares the Bitcoin PoW mechanism with Ethereum's PoS after 2022: It used to rely on continuous iteration of nonces to find hashes that meet the conditions and generate blocks by a single participant. Now it uses verifier signatures. In the future, FOCIL will be used to realize multi-role decentralization and co-construction of blocks. Transaction-related signatures, certifications and other components will be split and aggregated in the memory pool.
This picture excerpts the six-step network operation process from the Bitcoin white paper, and points out that its native design lacks capabilities such as memory pool aggregation, distributed block construction, and sender anonymization. It also illustrates the improvements of Ethereum PoS and PeerDAS: block construction is separated from fork selection, and nodes only need to download a small part of the block, relying on parallel proof to reduce consensus delays.
This figure compares the Merkle tree pruning scheme proposed in the Bitcoin white paper with Ethereum's new storage strategy: Bitcoin can delete spent transactions to free up hard disk space, while in the future Ethereum will further reduce storage through state and history separation, SNARK proof, and also introduce distributed state storage and diversified storage media optimization.
This picture explains the privacy idea of the Bitcoin white paper: Relying solely on public key anonymity can only hide the identity but make the transaction amount public. This solution is not enough under modern data analysis, while ZK‑SNARK, FOCIL and EIP‑8288 can build stronger programmable privacy. At the same time, the issues of query read privacy and network broadcast privacy need to be solved.
Big changes appear in almost every chapter of the white paper. In order to simplify the content, we have organized it into the following table:
Almost all the core attributes contained in the concept of blockchain have either undergone fundamental changes or are about to undergo underlying changes:
Verification mechanism: Download and re-execute → PeerDAS sampling and SNARK verification
Consensus mechanism: proof of work → proof of equity → deeply optimized proof of equity
Block construction authority: a single miner generates a block → multiple parties jointly build a block
To paraphrase AI, the only objective and credible conclusion (well, the core point) is that modern encrypted networks like Ethereum, which has been streamlined and upgraded, are called "blockchains" largely for historical reasons. In fact, it is a hybrid architecture that integrates two major systems:
Satoshi Nakamoto’s core philosophy
Fifty years of academic research have resulted in new and powerful cryptographic tools that were either not yet available or immature in 2009
How much cryptography is hidden in the encryption system? Three-year comparison of 2009, 2020, and 2030
Cryptozoology is not the only key discipline. Formal verification, database theory, P2P network theory improvements, information theory, economics and other fields are equally important. But these technologies are all compatible with this set of basic logic: everyone tries to generate the next block containing a valid proof of work, one person broadcasts it after successfully generating it, and everyone else downloads the block and re-executes it, and the cycle repeats. Changes at the cryptographic level are completely different.
So, what does this all mean for users? The most important conclusion is that the dimensions of trade-offs that users need to make are changing dramatically:
When developing applications, computing structures become critical. In a simple blockchain, one byte is one byte, and one unit of Gas is one unit of Gas. In the future architecture: if you cram all the calculations into a single transaction that is difficult to disassemble and execute serially, the cost of the same amount of calculations will be much higher; but if the calculations are split into independent tasks that are well packaged, support parallelism or can be cut in advance, it is best to complete preprocessing before the transaction is sent to the final block, and the cost will be significantly reduced. This will change the incentive orientation of developers, and over time, the architecture of all Ethereum applications will change accordingly: in the long term, we may form a new programming paradigm - only the core information describing non-exchange state changes and execution sequences is put on the chain, and all other data is aggregated before being included in the block.
Reasonable organization of calculations can allow the blockchain to focus more on completing its core tasks
Perhaps the most significant change is that the decentralized nature of the network is no longer just a performance burden in exchange for security and robustness; in some limited scenarios, decentralization itself can even become a performance advantage. Decentralized networks can store massive amounts of data in parallel; a large number of calculations can be performed in parallel, and many calculations are completed directly in the transaction memory pool. In some scenarios, decentralization can also improve privacy, because only decentralized networks can effectively hide metadata (such as the source of data and requests).
Back in the mid-2010s, this was the early vision of Ethereum: decentralization not just to improve robustness, but also to improve scalability. Centralized systems can improve performance by splitting tasks among multiple participants, and blockchain can do the same. At that time, this idea could not be implemented, and the core shortcoming was the verification mechanism. After the task is split, you must verify that each sub-task is executed correctly. Early solutions tried to solve the problem through random sampling committees, but they all encountered the same bottleneck: first, committee deployment was complex and costly, and would significantly increase delays; second, once the committee failed, there was no remedy. Now relying on modern cryptography, this problem has been solved, and the additional overhead caused by this solution is still decreasing month by month.
Another area of note where decentralization is expected to improve performance is latency. Ethereum itself will never be able to match the latency of a centralized server, but the infrastructure built on Ethereum can.
In general, building a powerful decentralized middle layer between users and the main chain (this layer itself is not a blockchain) can greatly enhance the capabilities of Ethereum without destroying the core features of the underlying blockchain.
Looking further into the future, Ethereum may also usher in a new round of changes - program obfuscation (iO) may rise. The ultimate goal of this field: mature and available obfuscation techniques that can eliminate the trade-off between privacy and generality. You can implement fully universal computations involving an unlimited number of (asynchronous) participants in a completely secure and encrypted form. Even the weakened version of obfuscation technology has many implementation scenarios, such as encrypted transaction memory pools. But all the conclusions proposed in this article were established before this technology was implemented.
This is the cryptographic world computer: Ethereum is no longer just a ledger, allowing developers to write computing tasks and data and execute them at will; the new architecture integrates blockchain, cryptographic privacy, cryptographic verification, and powerful decentralized off-chain components.
There are still a lot of challenges in implementing this design completely. It is not easy to make zero-knowledge proof efficient and secure enough, but it is an encapsulated complex problem that has been optimized on a large scale with the help of AI tools. The more difficult and systemically complex problems are likely to be the management and parallel access of massive states. Many solution ideas have emerged, but they still need to be continuously refined, especially as we learn more about what applications will be run in the future.
Looking at the Strawmap roadmap, we can see that the Hegota hard fork, scheduled to be launched next year, will most likely be the last "regular hard fork" of Ethereum. Its functions and technologies are still familiar to developers in 2015. All upgrades after Hegota will include recursive STARK, automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus algorithms, and system-wide quantum-resistant modifications. The implementation of PeerDAS marks the beginning of the transformation of Ethereum: evolving from a simple blockchain to a much more powerful system. After the Hegota upgrade, this transformation will become the main line of Ethereum's development. The ultimate goal: to realize a high-security computing system that is cheaper, more scalable, and has better privacy protection than the previous generation of technology. This is the cryptography world computer.