Buterin: Hegota Upgrade Marks Ethereum's Last Normal Fork

Next year's Hegota upgrade is likely to be Ethereum (ETH)'s last normal fork, according to co-founder Vitalik Buterin. He said that subsequent work will involve advanced cryptography and quantum-safe designs.

Buterin shared his perspective 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.

A Fork Familiar to a Developer From 2015

Buterin referenced the Strawmap, a draft long-term Ethereum roadmap, to situate Hegota on the timeline.

“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.

Buterin stated that all upgrades after Hegota will include recursive STARKs, a cryptographic proof type, as well as automated formal verification, optimized consensus, and quantum safety.

Recursive STARKs and quantum-resistant cryptography were also key components of the Lean Ethereum plan he outlined earlier this year.

Hegota itself, however, is still in the early planning stages. The Ethereum.org Hegota page lists two scheduled changes: Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) and frame transactions.

FOCIL allows a committee of validators to suggest transaction lists that block builders are required to adopt. Frame transactions, on the other hand, enable each account to execute its own verification logic and select quantum-resistant signatures.

Buterin's 2030 Vision: Verification, Speed, and Privacy

Beyond the fork schedule, Buterin's essay makes a broader argument about Ethereum's identity. He wrote that after the 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.