Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin anticipates that the Hegota upgrade slated for next year will mark the network’s final conventional fork. Subsequent development, he noted, will focus on quantum-safe architectures and advanced cryptography.
Buterin shared this perspective in a September 27 post on his personal blog, where he evaluated Ethereum across the years 2015, 2025, and 2030 in comparison to the original Bitcoin (BTC) whitepaper.
The Fork a 2015 Developer Would Still Recognize
To contextualize the timeline for Hegota, Buterin referenced the Strawmap, which serves as a draft long-term roadmap for Ethereum.
“If you look at the Strawmap, Hegota – the fork planned for next year – is likely to be Ethereum’s last ‘normal’ fork, with features and technology that would be recognizable to someone in 2015,” he said.
Following Hegota, Buterin explained that all upcoming work will center on recursive STARKs—a specific category of cryptographic proof—alongside automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus mechanisms, and quantum resistance.
These elements—recursive STARKs and quantum-resistant cryptography—were also highlighted earlier this year in the Lean Ethereum framework he presented.
At present, Hegota remains in its early planning stages. The Hegota page on Ethereum.org outlines two planned modifications: frame transactions and Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL).
With FOCIL, a committee of validators generates transaction lists that block builders are required to respect. Frame transactions allow individual accounts to execute their own verification logic and select quantum-resistant signatures.
Buterin’s 2030 Blueprint for Verification, Speed, and Privacy
Moving beyond the schedule for network upgrades, Buterin’s essay addresses Ethereum’s broader identity. He suggested that once the Lean upgrades are implemented, Ethereum will maintain the label of a blockchain primarily for historical reasons.
To support this argument, he pointed out that almost every foundational characteristic of a blockchain has undergone or will soon undergo transformation. Verification serves as a prime example: under the 2010 paradigm, nodes had to download and re-execute every single block.
By the year 2030, he anticipates that nodes will instead rely on Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) and verify cryptographic proofs.
Users will experience these shifts through enhancements in speed. His benchmarks target slot durations of approximately 4 to 8 seconds, with finality achieved in roughly 8 to 32 seconds. For context, Ethereum required about 200 seconds to attain 12 confirmations back in 2015.
Additionally, Buterin suggested that decentralization—historically viewed purely as a trade-off cost for security—can occasionally benefit performance. A decentralized network is capable of storing data and executing computations in parallel, as he pointed out.
He conceded that constructing this architecture still presents unsolved problems. Developing zero-knowledge proofs that are both efficient and secure remains difficult, though artificial intelligence (AI) applications are already assisting in their optimization. Managing access to massive state sizes will likely prove to be the more formidable obstacle, he added.
Prior to the rollout of that phase, Ethereum must still deploy two upgrades. Hegota is set to succeed Glamsterdam, whose Sepolia testnet fork is planned for October 6. Mainnet deployment for Glamsterdam is listed on Ethereum.org for Q4 2026, though a specific date has not been finalized.
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