Buterin: Hegotá Will Be Ethereum’s Last ‘Normal’ Upgrade

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Sunday that the forthcoming Hegotá upgrade, planned for 2027, will likely be the last network fork whose underlying technology would be recognizable to a developer from 2015. In a blog post titled “The cryptographic world computer,” Buterin laid out a 2030 vision in which Ethereum still calls itself a blockchain but operates on a fundamentally different architecture, according to CoinDesk and Cointelegraph.

Hegotá will introduce PeerDAS, a data-availability scheme that lets nodes verify transaction data by sampling portions of it rather than downloading everything. Buterin described PeerDAS as the start of Ethereum’s transition “from being just a blockchain to being something much more powerful” — a shift he frames as the network evolving into a “cryptographic world computer.”

Under Buterin’s roadmap, applications would offload more computation offchain, using the base layer primarily to verify proofs, settle transactions and maintain shared state. A computer processing transactions would generate a short mathematical proof that it followed the rules; other computers could check that proof far faster than re-executing the original work. Spot checks would confirm the underlying data remains available, allowing different machines to handle different jobs while still auditing one another.

Ethereum has long wanted to split work this way, Buterin wrote, but the pieces did not exist a decade ago. “Back then, this was not viable for one primary reason: the missing ingredient was verification,” he said, according to CoinDesk.

The co-founder’s post also detailed privacy plans beyond payments. Checking a balance today often involves querying an outside server that can link an address to a user’s activity. Buterin envisages hiding those queries, along with payment details and the spending rules an account uses, so a business could keep its finances confidential even while employees check balances.

The shift, he argues, should make Ethereum far cheaper, more scalable and more private. But significant engineering remains: proof generation must become efficient enough for mass use, and computers handling separate jobs need to coordinate updates to shared balances without conflict. Payments, meanwhile, are expected to become final in roughly eight to 32 seconds.

Buterin’s vision drew debate over how much computation and state should move offchain. Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot argued that while moving computation offchain could lighten the network’s load, a “world computer” should still keep important application records directly onchain so users can inspect and interact without intermediaries, according to Cointelegraph.

Pseudonymous commentator Cryptographic said the design could expand decentralized finance by letting complex computations — such as collateral analysis, liquidation routing or matching borrowers and lenders — occur offchain before Ethereum verifies and settles the result. Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro countered that many financial services rely on reputation, regulation and legal enforcement rather than continuous cryptographic proof, and he questioned the real demand for proof-based systems.

Buterin expects Hegotá to be the last fork built with technology familiar to the 2015-era network. After it, Ethereum’s primary story becomes this transformation, he wrote, with subsequent upgrades leaning on recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, optimized consensus and quantum-safe cryptography.