Ethereum’s next big upgrade could be the last one that would make sense to someone who followed the network in 2015. On Sunday, co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the Hegotá upgrade, planned for 2027, is probably the final fork built around technology that veteran users would still recognize.
What Buterin Is Signaling
After Hegotá, he expects development to move toward recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, optimized consensus and quantum-safe cryptography. The Ethereum Foundation has already named two EIPs that must ship in the upgrade, so the near-term roadmap is taking shape.
Buterin pointed to PeerDAS as the starting point of the shift. It lets nodes check data availability by sampling small pieces of data instead of downloading everything. In his view, that marks the moment Ethereum began moving beyond being just a blockchain.
The “Cryptographic World Computer” Idea
Buterin calls the destination a “cryptographic world computer.” Today, nodes download transactions and re-run them. The model he describes mixes blockchains with cryptographic verification, privacy tools and decentralized offchain components.
For developers, that could change how apps get built. More computation would run offchain, while the base layer verifies the results, settles transactions and keeps shared onchain state accessible.
Builders Like the Direction, With Caveats
The post kicked off a debate over how much computation and state should leave the chain, and what Ethereum should keep handling directly.
Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot said committing to results and proving them onchain could cut the network’s workload and allow lighter nodes. But he argued a world computer should still keep the records its apps depend on directly onchain. That way, users can see what’s happening and interact with applications without depending on outside servers or middlemen.
Pseudonymous commentator Cryptographic focused on DeFi. In lending, tasks like collateral analysis, liquidation routing and matching borrowers with lenders could happen offchain, with Ethereum verifying that the outcome follows protocol rules and then settling it. That could allow far more complex products than smart contracts handle today.
The Skeptic’s Question
Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro raised a harder point: how much demand is there for proof-based systems compared with trust-based ones? Much of traditional finance runs on reputation, regulation and legal enforcement, not constant cryptographic verification. Better proofs only matter if users and institutions want them.
What Happens Next
Hegotá is still a year away, and Buterin’s roadmap is a direction, not a finished spec. The open questions are practical ones. How much work moves offchain? What stays on Ethereum? Will the market pay for verification over trust? The answers will decide whether the “world computer” is a genuine turning point or an elegant idea that people don’t adopt.
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