Vitalik Buterin Unveils Ethereum's Next-Gen Architecture
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined his vision for the network's next decade, calling it 'The Cryptographic World Computer.' He argues that Ethereum is no longer just a blockchain but a hybrid of blockchain and modern cryptography.
In a recent post, Buterin explained that users would get finality in 8 to 32 seconds, compared to roughly 200 seconds for 12 confirmations today. The current architecture will be replaced with recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, heavily optimized consensus, and making the lot quantum-safe.
The changes are part of a larger overhaul that involves moving from downloading and re-executing every block to sampling data with PeerDAS and checking a SNARK for verification. Consensus will move to a proof of stake model, and block construction will be handled by multiple parties building it together.
This new architecture is designed to improve decentralization as an advantage, allowing data to be stored in parallel, computation to happen in parallel inside the mempool, and metadata to be hidden in ways a centralized system cannot manage. However, Buterin notes that managing and parallelizing access to very large amounts of state remains 'more difficult, and systemically complex.'