Ethereum's Future Upgrades May Rely on Cryptographic Proofs

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, believes that future upgrades to the network will focus on cryptographic proofs rather than traditional hard forks.

This shift in approach is expected with Hegotá, a protocol upgrade planned for 2027, which will mark the last 'normal' fork. This means that instead of bundles of recognizable features, upcoming forks will be built around infrastructure like formal verification and quantum resistance.

The current issue with Ethereum's scalability is that each new computer added to the network still checks a significant amount of the same activity as existing computers, which doesn't automatically expand capacity. Buterin proposes using zero-knowledge proofs to let a computer process transactions and generate a short mathematical proof that it followed the rules.

Other computers could then check this proof much faster than repeating the underlying work. This approach would also enable different computers to take on different jobs while still checking one another's results, although Ethereum would still need to settle ordering disputes.