Vitalik Sees Hegotá as Ethereum's Last Familiar Fork

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that the Hegotá upgrade, planned for 2027, may be the last 'normal' fork in a way that developers building Ethereum today will find familiar. This comes as Ethereum is transitioning from a traditional blockchain to a cryptographic world computer that relies on cryptographic proofs to verify offchain computation and preserve privacy.

The shift towards a cryptographic world computer was framed by Buterin as a bridge towards more fundamental architectural changes. He highlighted technologies such as recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, optimized consensus, and quantum-safe cryptography, which will increasingly depend on machine-verifiable proofs rather than the straightforward re-execution model most users associate with blockchains.

This change in architecture is exemplified by PeerDAS, a system that lets nodes verify data availability by sampling pieces of data instead of requiring full downloads. Buterin sees this as the beginning of Ethereum's move towards a more powerful platform, where networks can verify what matters while reducing the burden of doing everything themselves.