Ethereum’s 2030 Plan Moves Beyond Blocks and Transactions

Ethereum’s next big redesign may look less like a faster blockchain and more like a computer that proves its work. In an essay published on September 27, Vitalik Buterin described the path he wants the network to take after Hegota, including cheaper proofs, shorter settlement times and more private computation.

The practical change is straightforward. A computer would process transactions and produce a short proof that it followed Ethereum’s rules. Other computers could check the proof instead of repeating all the work. The harder part is making that verification cheap, coordinating parallel work securely and doing it without exposing information that Ethereum users may want kept private.

What changes after Hegota

Buterin expects Hegota, planned for 2027, to be Ethereum’s last “normal” fork. In other words, it may be the final upgrade built mainly with technology familiar to an Ethereum developer working in 2015.

The next phase pulls in the multi-year Lean Ethereum upgrade series, which Buterin said would replace almost every major part of the protocol. He compares its scope with the Merge, Ethereum’s 2022 move to proof-of-stake.

Hegota gets a suitably hybrid name. Bogotá, a previous Devcon host city, represents the execution layer, where transactions are processed. Heze, a star, represents the consensus layer, where validators agree on the network’s record. The detail neatly captures what Buterin thinks the project is becoming: familiar blockchain machinery combined with newer cryptographic tools.

Checks replace repeated work

One of the clearest examples is already live. PeerDAS shipped with the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025. It lets validators sample blob data rather than downloading every part of it. Buterin expects that coverage to expand to full block contents.

A second change moves signature work away from the chain. Draft EIP-8288 would aggregate signatures offchain and place one aggregated signature onchain for each block. Under the proposal, only entry nodes would see individual signatures and proofs. The intended result is less public transaction data, although the brief does not establish the EIP’s final status or its exact readiness.

These are not cosmetic changes. They alter who does the work, what the network publishes and what another computer needs to check. Instead of reproducing the entire computation, a verifier could check a compact result.

But Buterin says Ethereum tried a similar distributed-computing direction around a decade ago. The missing ingredient was verification. The network needed a way to establish that participants had completed their work correctly before the approach became practical.

Shorter slots, faster finality

Buterin projects slots, the intervals in which new blocks are proposed, of four to eight seconds by 2030. He expects finality, the point after which a block cannot be reversed, to take eight to 32 seconds.

Hegota is also set to introduce FOCIL, or fork-choice-enforced inclusion lists. Under that design, multiple validators, rather than one block builder, can force valid transactions into a block. That spreads participation in deciding what must be included.

For users, the proposed result is a network that confirms transactions and proves computation more quickly. For developers, it changes the model they can build on. But the gain is not automatic. If proofs become expensive, if parallel work cannot be coordinated securely or if complex applications still carry high costs, the architecture will not deliver the full result in the essay.

Privacy depends on what the network reveals

Buterin also connects decentralization with privacy. A decentralized network can sometimes hide where data and requests come from because no single server controls the full picture.

He uses wallet metadata as an example. Checking a balance today can send a query to an outside server, which may learn which accounts someone follows. His plan would hide those requests along with payment details and the rules an account uses to approve spending.

The 2030 comparison still includes cost and privacy limits for complex applications. Better infrastructure may reduce those limits, but it does not remove them outright.

The harder problem is Ethereum’s state

The most important gap may sit underneath the headline features. Buterin calls the management and parallelization of very large amounts of Ethereum state his biggest open problem. He thinks it will be harder than making zero-knowledge proofs efficient and safe.

That is an admission rather than a forecast of failure. The proposed system still needs engineers to make large computations cheaper, coordinate them safely and keep the underlying data available through spot checks.

Glamsterdam, the upgrade before Hegota, is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, after previously being targeted for the first half. For now, it remains the nearer milestone. Ethereum’s larger shift is still ahead, but the pieces are becoming easier to see.