# Ethereum co-founder Buterin looks forward to the future of the protocol

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared his vision for the future of the merged Ethereum protocol in a blog post on October 14, Cointelegraph reported. Buterin emphasized that the protocol is expected to achieve significant improvements in terms of proof of stake (PoS), security and user accessibility.

Buterin pointed out that one of the main goals of Ethereum in the future is to reduce transaction completion time, which currently takes about 15 minutes. He suggested exploring solutions such as single-slot finality to improve transaction speed and user experience.

In addition, Buterin proposed lowering the staking threshold from 32 ETH to 1 ETH to attract more users to participate in network governance and security. He also emphasized the importance of improving network security through encryption techniques such as single secret leader election.

Buterin’s post comes as Ethereum looks forward to the next milestone on its development roadmap – the Pectra upgrade, scheduled to go live in the first quarter of 2025.