Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out a long-term vision in which the network abandons its early resemblance to Bitcoin and becomes what he calls, in his own words, "la computadora criptográfica mundial" — the world cryptographic computer. The essay, published on September 27, traces a line from Bitcoin's 2010 design through Ethereum's 2015 launch to the network as it exists today, arguing that the distance travelled is already substantial and will widen sharply by the end of the decade.
For a European audience watching Ethereum primarily through the lens of institutional adoption and regulatory scrutiny, Buterin's framing matters because it reframes the network's identity. Rather than a faster or more programmable version of Bitcoin, he describes Ethereum as heading toward an architecture built around advanced cryptography, where verification and computation are handled in fundamentally different ways than in either network's original design.
PeerDAS as the turning point
According to the essay, the real inflection point is PeerDAS, an upgrade that allows nodes to confirm data availability through sampling rather than downloading and re-executing an entire block. Buterin presents this as the moment the network's core assumptions start to diverge from the Bitcoin-style model it began with, describing earlier stages of Ethereum's evolution as effectively "encapsulada" — enclosed — within that original paradigm.
The next scheduled step is an upgrade called Hegotá, planned for next year. Buterin characterises it as the last "fork normal" the network will undergo, a standard, conventional hard fork of the kind Ethereum has carried out repeatedly since 2015. After Hegotá, he suggests, the pace and nature of change will shift toward something less incremental.
What comes after 2030
Buterin projects that by 2030 almost all of the network's fundamental properties will have been transformed. Among the developments he points to are recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimised consensus algorithms and measures aimed at resistance to quantum computers. He frames the work ahead as concentrated on two technical fronts: making zero-knowledge proofs both efficient and secure, and managing and parallelising access to increasingly large volumes of state data.
Neither front is trivial, and the essay does not offer a detailed timeline beyond Hegotá for how these pieces fit together. What it does offer is a clear marker: Bitcoin's 2010 design and Ethereum's 2015 launch are treated as reference points for a system that, in Buterin's account, is already leaving both behind.
Buterin also posted about the essay on X, formerly Twitter, drawing attention to the piece beyond the Ethereum research community that typically reads his longer technical writing.
