Vitalik Buterin Says Next Year's Hegota Will Be Ethereum's Last ‘Normal' Fork

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin expects next year’s Hegota upgrade to be the network’s last conventional fork. He said the work after it would involve advanced cryptography and quantum-safe designs.

Buterin set out the view in a September 27 essay on his personal blog. In it, he compared Ethereum in 2015, 2025, and 2030 with the original Bitcoin (BTC) whitepaper.

The Fork a 2015 Developer Would Still Recognize

Buterin pointed to the Strawmap, a draft long-term Ethereum roadmap, when placing Hegota in the schedule.

“If you look at the Strawmap, Hegota – the fork planned for next year – is likely to be Ethereum’s last ‘normal’ fork, with features and technology that would be recognizable to someone in 2015,” he said.

According to Buterin, everything after Hegota involves recursive STARKs, a type of cryptographic proof. That later work also covers automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus, and quantum safety.

Recursive STARKs and quantum-resistant cryptography were also central to the Lean Ethereum plan he outlined earlier this year.

However, Hegota itself remains in early planning. Ethereum.org’s Hegota page lists two scheduled changes: Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) and frame transactions.

FOCIL lets a committee of validators propose transaction lists that block builders must honor. Frame transactions, meanwhile, let each account run its own verification logic and choose quantum-resistant signatures.

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Buterin’s 2030 Blueprint for Verification, Speed, and Privacy

Beyond the fork schedule, Buterin’s essay makes a broader argument about Ethereum’s identity. He wrote that after its Lean upgrades, Ethereum would carry the blockchain label largely for historical reasons.

To make that case, he argued that nearly every core property of a blockchain has changed or soon will. Verification is one example. Under the 2010 model, nodes downloaded and re-executed every block.

By 2030, he expects nodes to verify a cryptographic proof and use Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) instead.

Users would feel those changes through speed. His targets include slots of roughly 4 to 8 seconds and finality within about 8 to 32 seconds. By comparison, Ethereum in 2015 needed about 200 seconds to reach 12 confirmations.

Buterin also argued that decentralization, once purely a cost paid for safety, could help performance in a few limited cases. A decentralized network, he noted, can store data and run computation in parallel.

Building this design still involves open problems, he acknowledged. Zero-knowledge proofs remain hard to make efficient and safe, although artificial intelligence (AI) tools already help optimize them. Managing access to very large amounts of state would likely be the harder challenge, he added.

Before that work begins, Ethereum still has two upgrades to ship. Hegota is expected to follow Glamsterdam, whose Sepolia testnet fork is scheduled for October 6. Ethereum.org lists Glamsterdam’s mainnet launch for Q4 2026 with no confirmed date.

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