Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a post on September 27 arguing that Ethereum is no longer accurately described as a blockchain in the traditional sense.
"It's really not just a blockchain anymore. It's a hybrid architecture that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography, to enable much more powerful properties," Buterin wrote on X, sharing the essay titled "The cryptographic world computer."
The post walks through the original Bitcoin whitepaper section by section, comparing how each mechanism has changed across Ethereum's 2015, 2025, and projected 2030 versions. Buterin frames the upcoming Hegota fork, planned for next year, as a dividing line.
"Hegota... is likely to be Ethereum's last 'normal' fork, with features and technology that would be recognizable to someone in 2015," he wrote. "Everything after that involves recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus algorithms, and making it all quantum-safe."
What actually changes in how blocks get verified
The core shift Buterin describes is in verification itself. In 2010, verifying a block meant a full download and recompute of every transaction. In the 2030 target state, verification happens through SNARK proofs combined with PeerDAS, a data availability sampling technique that lets nodes confirm data exists without downloading all of it.
Block construction also splits apart. Where a single miner built a block in 2010, the future model involves multi-party construction: transactions move from a privacy-preserving mempool to a FOCILer or builder before final inclusion. FOCIL, or Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, is designed to let validators force inclusion of valid transactions a builder might otherwise censor, addressing censorship resistance directly at the protocol level rather than relying on builder goodwill.
How the privacy and computation tradeoffs shift for users
Buterin's tradeoff table contrasts 2015 Ethereum against the 2030 target directly. Where 2015 offered no privacy of account policy, 2030 Ethereum adds "ZK-SNARKs + private account abstraction." Where reading data in 2015 required running a full node or having none, 2030 offers a full node option that's easier to run because SNARKs remove computation requirements, plus alternative techniques like TEE+ORAM and private information retrieval.
Latency also compresses substantially. 2015 Ethereum took roughly 17 seconds per block and about 200 seconds for 12 confirmations. The 2030 target cuts that to 4 to 8 seconds per slot and 8 to 32 seconds for finality.
Buterin frames decentralization itself as shifting roles, moving from a pure cost incurred for safety toward, in specific cases, an actual performance advantage. He points to parallel processing inside the mempool and distributed data storage as areas where spreading work across a decentralized network can increase throughput rather than only adding overhead, a reversal of the tradeoff that has historically defined blockchain design since 2009. This reframing matters because it addresses a long-standing criticism of decentralized systems: that they trade performance for trust. Buterin's argument is that modern cryptographic verification, specifically SNARK proofs, removes the verification bottleneck that made distributed work-splitting impractical in earlier blockchain designs, since each unit of parallelized work can now be proven correct without requiring a trusted committee to vouch for it.
Why structuring computation will matter for developers
The essay argues that how developers structure their code will increasingly affect cost under the new architecture.
"In a simple blockchain, 1 byte = 1 byte and 1 gas = 1 gas," Buterin wrote. "In the architectures of the future, the same amount of computation will cost you much more if you shove it all into one inscrutable serially-executed transaction, and much less if you put it into well-encapsulated dependencies that can be parallelized or pruned."
This has direct implications for how DeFi protocols, lending markets, and liquidation engines get built going forward. Applications that batch unrelated logic into single monolithic transactions will face higher gas costs relative to applications that separate independent state changes into parallelizable components. Over time, this creates a structural incentive for developers to redesign contract architecture around parallelization-friendly patterns rather than the linear, serially-executed style that has dominated Solidity development since Ethereum's 2015 launch, since gas pricing itself will reward code that fits the network's new execution model.
Buterin also raised indistinguishability obfuscation, or iO, as a longer-horizon possibility that could eventually eliminate the tradeoff between privacy and generalized computation entirely, though he was clear that "all of the conclusions in this post will apply long before any of that becomes available."
He closed by describing the destination directly: "much more cheap, scalable and private high-security computation than anything that could be done with the previous era's technology alone. The cryptographic world computer."
Gunel Ismayilova
Disclaimer: All materials on this site are for informational purposes only. None of the material should be interpreted as investment advice. Please note that, despite the nature of much of the material created and hosted on this website, HODL FM operates as a media and informational platform, not a provider of financial advisory services. The opinions of authors and other contributors are their own and should not be taken as financial advice. If you require advice, HODL FM strongly recommends contacting a qualified industry professional.
