Vitalik Buterin Outlines 'Cryptographic World Computer' Plan for Ethereum

In brief

• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published "The cryptographic world computer" on Saturday, setting out what he sees as the network's next decade.
• Buterin argues the network is already a hybrid of blockchain and modern cryptography, and is called a blockchain for "historical reasons."
• Users would get finality in 8 to 32 seconds, against roughly 200 seconds for 12 confirmations today.

Ethereum's next upgrade will be the last one anyone from 2015 would recognize, its co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote in a post published on Saturday.

Hegota, the fork scheduled for next year, is "likely to be Ethereum's last 'normal' fork," he said. What follows involves recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, heavily optimized consensus and making the lot quantum-safe.

A post-Lean Ethereum is called a blockchain "to a large extent for historical reasons," Buterin wrote.

In reality, he argued, it is a "hybrid construction" merging Satoshi Nakamoto's ideas with cryptographic machinery that came out of 50 years of academic work and "did not even exist" in 2009. That architecture, he tweeted, will "enable much more powerful properties" than blockchain alone.

Verification, consensus, and block construction