Buterin Maps Out Ethereum's Cryptographic World Computer Future

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined his vision for Ethereum's development after the Hegotá fork, expected next year. According to him, Ethereum is shifting towards a 'cryptographic world computer', where advanced cryptography takes center stage.

This will bring significant changes to how transactions are verified and processed on the network. By 2030, Buterin expects verification to move towards PeerDAS, combined with SNARKs, which allow the network to verify large amounts of computation without repeating it.

The shift is already visible in consensus, moving from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and now heading towards a more efficient version of PoS. Block production could involve multiple participants instead of one party building the entire block.

Buterin points to upgrades like FOCIL, EIP-8288, Lean consensus, formal verification, and changes to Ethereum's mempool as part of this system designed to rely heavily on proofs and distributed processing. He also emphasizes the importance of state management, enabling the network to handle a larger amount of information without requiring every participant to do the same work.

This change could affect how developers build applications on Ethereum, favoring computation that can be broken into smaller pieces and handled separately. The network could 'decentralize not just for robustness but also to increase scale', according to Buterin, a goal initially hoped to achieve in the mid-2010s.