Editor's Note: On April 20th, at the highly anticipated opening ceremony of the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered the keynote speech, providing an in-depth analysis of Ethereum's ultimate vision as a "world computer" and its core roadmap for the next five years. The full text of the speech is below:
Good morning, everyone! Where is the Ethereum protocol headed? I believe we've seen many significant changes in the theoretical and ecosystem realms over the past few years. At the same time, we've also witnessed numerous transformations outside the Ethereum ecosystem, including the limitless possibilities brought by artificial intelligence, the potential imminent realization of quantum computing, and advancements in formal verification, cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and other fields.
I believe one of the most important things we've been doing is rethinking what truly makes sense: What's the point of using Ethereum? Why Ethereum? What are its characteristics? What makes a decentralized network need these characteristics?
For example, how can we integrate these new technologies into the Ethereum protocol we've written about before and our five-year plan? What exactly is the purpose of Ethereum? I believe it has two main functions:
First, Ethereum is like a public bulletin board. It's a place where applications can post messages, and everyone can see the content and order of these posts. These messages can be anything—transactions, hashes, encrypted data, or many other things. In fact, there are many opportunities for applications to use Ethereum as a place to post data while leveraging other types of protocols to interpret that data (i.e., decrypt and perform computations on it).
Secondly, there's computation. Essentially, Ethereum allows you to have shared digital objects controlled by code. These digital objects can be many things—assets, ERC-20 tokens, NFTs—and their meaning isn't limited to the theoretical (ENS is one example); they can even represent control over an organization (DAO is one example). You can do a lot, making both aspects extremely valuable. For decentralized applications, Ethereum ensures autonomy, security, verifiability, fair participation, and brings together all users.
"Self-sovereignty" essentially means that, as a user, you can participate, verify, and ensure your own security entirely based on your own infrastructure. You don't need to trust any third party to run Ethereum, nor do you need to trust any third party outside of Ethereum if you don't want to.
Therefore, verifiability and the ability to verify ensure that the chain operates correctly and that everything that happens is legitimate. It also guarantees the rights of anyone to publish information, allowing them to post it on bulletin boards. This is the core; we should view Ethereum as a technological module and consider all the applications that this technological foundation can support. The most interesting applications will be the products of a combination of on-chain and off-chain technologies. This includes ENS, prediction markets, and so on. Prediction markets have on-chain components (i.e., assets created for each event, which can be traded) and off-chain components (one of which is oracles). Sometimes the design of prediction markets or order matching occurs on-chain; additionally, there are privacy-related considerations.
For example, cryptographic protocols have been studied for decades with the aim of simplifying or enabling secure electronic voting. Many such protocols often rely on public bulletin boards where people can post information. In this case, they are encrypted ballots, ensuring everyone's participation. Anything related to privacy must include an on-chain portion (for publishing data) and an off-chain portion (for interpreting data).
If it interprets the data, then it must be done off-chain through a private protocol. So, we've talked a lot about Layer 2. In my opinion, to determine which type of L2 is meaningful, we must first understand which type is meaningless: if you simply copy Ethereum, scale it up 100 times, make it more centralized, and that's it, it's pointless. I think truly meaningful L2 is when you start examining various applications and asking what off-chain components they need? What other parts do they need besides L1? And then you build those things up.
What does this mean for Ethereum? We need to scale up data; we need the ability to publish more data on-chain. PeerDAS, introduced in last year's recent hard fork, already includes this, but we still need to push further. Scaling up computing power is also important because, as part of the Ethereum chain, scaling up computing power can help different applications come together and communicate with each other without intermediaries.
If you visit the roadmap website (roadmap.org), you can find a roadmap designed for the next five years. The core short-term goals of the protocol are: firstly, short-term scaling by continuing to actively increase the gas limit; and secondly, the rollout of zkEVM. zkEVM allows Ethereum to scale further and perform more complex computations while still making on-chain information easily verifiable. There is also preparation for the early post-quantum era. We have been thinking about quantum computing for years, we have long recognized it as a potential vulnerability, and we have some measures in place. Soon, in the near future, we will improve Ethereum's quantum security and refine the entire roadmap.
For example, eventually, all parts of Ethereum will be fully quantum-resistant and highly efficient. Furthermore, the block building process will be improved, and privacy support will be strengthened. Therefore, many EIP proposals for short-term scaling will be applied in the next phase, such as the **Block Access List** enabling parallelization; gas repricing will improve efficiency and make increasing the gas cap safer.
ePBS (Separation of Proposers and Builders) makes Ethereum blocks take longer to verify and also more secure, and improves the ability of nodes to download states. There's also EIP-8141 (Account Abstraction Proposal), which is both very simple and very powerful. Essentially, a transaction is a series of calls, one of which might be verification, and another might be execution. This allows Ethereum to easily implement native support for smart contract wallets for making payments on behalf of others, and supports quantum-resistant signature algorithms and privacy protocols.
Therefore, this makes Ethereum more versatile, enabling it to support many functions. Quantum-resistant signature algorithms do exist, have been around for 20 years, and we know what they are and how to build them. The problem is that they are inefficient. A quantum-resistant signature takes 2000-3000 bytes, while a current signature is only 64 bytes; it also costs 200,000 Gas on-chain, while now it only costs 3000 Gas. Therefore, there are two types of signatures we can use: one is hash-based, and the other is lattice-based. Our idea is to add vectorization and incorporate it into the EVM, essentially using the same logic as making computers run artificial intelligence quickly. We are actively working to make signatures resistant to quantum attacks and more efficient.
State storage, account balances, and smart contract execution scaling are relatively easy, but storage scaling is more difficult, and there's still a lot of work to be done in this area. So, this is all the short-term and long-term planning, and this is the direction we truly want Ethereum to take. Ethereum is not meant to compete with high-frequency trading platforms, nor is it meant to be the fastest chain. Ethereum aims to be a secure chain, a decentralized chain, a chain that will always be online, a chain you can always rely on.
Therefore, one goal is to ensure secure consensus to the greatest extent possible. This means that if the network is secure, it can withstand a 49% failure rate in nodes, and in fact, it can withstand almost all nodes going offline, thus possessing the same characteristics as Bitcoin. If the network encounters problems, you still maintain 33% security certainty. That's the first part.
The second part involves formally verifying everything. We've also begun actively applying artificial intelligence to generate code proofs demonstrating that the software version running Ethereum does indeed possess the characteristics it's supposed to have. We've made progress that was impossible two years ago. Artificial intelligence is developing rapidly, so we're leveraging this to pursue ultimate simplicity, keeping long-term protocols as simple as possible, and preparing for the future as much as possible.
Therefore, a network needs to pass offline testing. If a network needs to be used, you can rely on it even without a power outlet. This is essentially the same principle, and it's what Bitcoin strives for. If you want to be a long-term holder, you need to ensure the security of your digital assets over the long term. You need to rely on something that can continuously guarantee security, one that doesn't depend on the continued existence or continuous operation of a particular team. Ethereum's consensus combines the advantages of two methods: Bitcoin's longest chain rule and the BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) method. This is finality, possessing optimal security characteristics, quantum security, and fast finality.
Therefore, finality is completed within one to three block slots, and the chain is expected to complete finality in approximately 10-20 seconds, or even less. zkVM allows you to verify the chain without relying on a large computer to run all operations yourself. Everyone should verify the chain before you trust it; even your phone and IoT devices should verify the chain. The zero-knowledge virtual machine zkVM is fast enough to prove that real-time virtual machine execution is feasible. This year's goal is to make it secure enough, starting with a small percentage of the network using zkVM and gradually increasing that percentage. By 2028, this will enable it to scale and process more transactions without sacrificing decentralization.
What is the vision behind all of this? Ethereum is a world computer. It is both a globally shared layer for making commitments, publishing data, and recording actions; a platform where data can be published, and where it can be proven whether data has been published or not, and is open to everyone; and a globally shared layer for ensuring the enforcement of high-value rules. Ethereum needs to be extremely robust and easily verifiable. I believe that in the future, with artificial intelligence, it will actually become easier, simpler than we imagine, truly ensuring software security.
If you want to ensure software security, but people are unwilling to do so, then software vulnerabilities will increase tenfold, and the number of attacks will also increase tenfold. Therefore, Ethereum, as a blockchain, needs to prioritize security first, followed by decentralization. Once these conditions are guaranteed, this security should be provided to users as much as possible. Therefore, if you intend to build decentralized applications, ensuring self-sovereignty, security, verifiability, and user participation—which includes finance, decentralized social networking, identity, and some financial and some non-financial applications (including ENS, prediction markets, etc.)—it covers a wide range of areas. Ethereum simplifies application development, and this is its core objective by default.
The roadmap for the next four years is designed around this goal, thank you!
