Buterin: Hegotá to Be Ethereum’s Last ‘Normal’ Fork

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network’s next upgrade, Hegotá — planned for 2027 — is likely to be its last “normal” fork, with more advanced cryptography taking over from there. Writing on Sunday, according to reports from Cryptopotato, Buterin argued the network is moving toward what he called a “cryptographic world computer” rather than remaining a conventional blockchain.

Cointelegraph, which also reported the remarks, noted that Buterin said Hegotá is likely to be the final upgrade whose features and technology would still be recognizable to someone familiar with Ethereum in 2015. The two reports align on the substance, with the outlet adding detail on how the architecture could change application design.

Key facts

• Buterin said Hegotá, planned for 2027, is likely Ethereum’s last “normal” fork before development shifts toward recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, optimized consensus and quantum-safe cryptography.
• PeerDAS — which lets nodes verify data availability by sampling portions of data rather than downloading everything — marked the start of Ethereum’s transition “from being just a blockchain to being something much more powerful,” according to Cointelegraph’s account of his post.
• Buterin also pointed to FOCIL, EIP-8288, Lean consensus, formal verification and changes to Ethereum’s mempool as part of a system designed to rely more heavily on proofs and distributed processing.
• Ethereum researcher Barnabé Monnot said moving computation offchain while committing to and proving results onchain could significantly reduce the work required from the network and enable lighter nodes, though he argued that a “world computer” should still keep important records onchain.
• Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro questioned how much demand exists for proof-based systems compared with traditional trust-based models, saying many existing financial services rely on reputation, regulation and legal enforcement rather than continuous cryptographic verification.

From block-by-block replay to proof sampling

Buterin contrasted Ethereum’s direction with the way early blockchains worked. In Bitcoin’s original model, every participant downloaded a block, checked it and re-executed its transactions. Ethereum still operates broadly along those lines.

Under the roadmap he describes, verification would move toward PeerDAS combined with SNARKs, letting the network confirm that a large amount of computation was done correctly without repeating all of it. The same pattern, he noted, is already visible in consensus, which moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and is now heading toward a more efficient version of PoS.

Block production could also change shape. Rather than one party building an entire block, several participants could be involved. State management, meanwhile, would need to handle access to far more information without asking every participant to do identical work.

A different role for decentralization

The shift would alter how developers build applications. Buterin argued Ethereum will increasingly favor computation that can be broken into smaller pieces and handled separately, rather than packed into a single large transaction. Developers could keep the information the network needs to record directly onchain while doing other work before it reaches the final block.

That reframes decentralization itself. Instead of being mainly a cost accepted for security, a distributed network could sometimes help Ethereum process more data and computation at once. Buterin wrote that the network could “decentralize not just for robustness but also to increase scale” — a goal those building it had hoped to reach as early as the mid-2010s.

Cointelegraph reported that the post prompted debate over how much computation and state should ultimately move offchain. Pseudonymous commentator Cryptographic said the architecture could expand what DeFi applications can do by allowing more complex computation outside smart contracts while Ethereum verifies that resulting transactions comply with protocol rules — citing lending as an example, where collateral analysis, liquidation routing, or matching borrowers and lenders could happen offchain before Ethereum verifies and settles the outcome.

Why it matters

If Hegotá is indeed the last conventional fork, the way Ethereum upgrades itself changes after 2027. The roadmap replaces a recognizable cycle of feature forks with a longer-term program built around proofs, formal verification and quantum-safe design — a shift that affects node operators, developers and the researchers who set the network’s direction. The debate around Monnot’s and Shapiro’s comments also matters: it is a live argument about whether proof-based architectures or reputation-and-regulation-based systems will carry more weight in financial services. For readers, that debate is the real signal, not the specific fork name. Ethereum was trading near $2,700 at the time of Cryptopotato’s report, down nearly 2.5% in 24 hours, up almost 5% over 14 days and 8% over 30 days, while about 34% lower than a year ago and roughly 47% below its all-time high near $4,950. Analyst Daan Crypto Trades called the $2,800 level — where the price was rejected last week after reclaiming its 200-day moving average — a major obstacle.

What to watch

The concrete next step is Hegotá itself: Buterin’s roadmap positions it as the pivot point, and its planned 2027 delivery is the milestone that will determine whether the post-fork program proceeds as outlined. In the nearer term, the level analysts flagged — Ethereum’s 200-day moving average and the $2,800 resistance — remains the price marker to follow.

Sources: CryptoPotato, Cointelegraph