Vitalik Buterin says Hegotá could be Ethereum’s last ‘normal’ fork

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Ethereum’s Hegotá upgrade could be the network’s last “normal” fork before development shifts toward technologies that include recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, optimized consensus and quantum-safe cryptography. 

On Sunday, Buterin said Hegotá, which is planned for 2027, is likely to be the final upgrade whose features and technology would still be recognizable to someone familiar with Ethereum in 2015. 

He said PeerDAS, which allows nodes to verify data availability by sampling portions of data rather than downloading everything, marked the beginning of Ethereum’s transition “from being just a blockchain to being something much more powerful.” 

Buterin described the transition as Ethereum’s evolution into a “cryptographic world computer,” moving beyond a model in which nodes simply download and re-execute transactions toward an architecture combining blockchains with cryptographic verification, privacy and decentralized offchain components.

The shift could change how Ethereum applications are built by moving more computation offchain while using the base layer to verify results, settle transactions and preserve access to shared onchain state.