Content organized by: Odaily Planet Daily

On April 20, 2026, the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival will grandly open at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered the keynote speech, deeply analyzing Ethereum's ultimate vision as a 'world computer' and the hardcore roadmap for the next five years.

The following is the full text of the speech:

Good morning, everyone! Where is the Ethereum protocol headed? I believe that in the past few years, we have seen many significant changes in the fields of theory and ecosystem. At the same time, we have also witnessed numerous transformations occurring outside the Ethereum ecosystem, including the infinite possibilities brought by artificial intelligence, the potential quick realization of quantum computing, and advancements in areas such as formal verification, cryptography, and zero-knowledge proofs.

I believe one of the important things we have been doing is rethinking what is truly meaningful: what is the significance of using Ethereum? Why Ethereum? What characteristics does it have? What makes a decentralized network need to have these characteristics?

For example, how can we integrate these new technologies into the Ethereum protocols we have previously written and the plans for the next five years? What is the ultimate purpose of Ethereum? I believe it has two main functions:

First, Ethereum acts like a public bulletin board. It is a place where applications can post messages, and everyone can see the content and order of the messages. These messages can be anything, ranging from transactions, hash values, encrypted data, to many other things. In fact, there are many opportunities for applications to use Ethereum as a place to publish data while leveraging other types of protocols to interpret that data (i.e., decrypt the data and perform computations on it).

The second is computing. Basically, Ethereum allows you to have shared digital objects controlled by code. These digital objects can be many things; they can be assets, ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, their meaning extends beyond theoretical levels (ENS is one example), and they can even represent control over organizations (DAO is another example). You can do many things, so both are highly valuable. For decentralized applications, Ethereum can guarantee autonomous security, verifiability, fair participation, and bring together all users.

"Self-sovereignty" basically means that as a user, you can participate, validate, and ensure your own security, entirely based on your own infrastructure. You don’t have to trust any third party to run Ethereum if you don’t want to, nor do you need to trust any third party outside of Ethereum.

Thus, verifiability and the ability to validate ensure that the chain operates correctly and verifies that everything that happens is as it should be, while also having the capability to guarantee anyone's rights and the right to publish actual information, which can be posted on the bulletin board. So this is core; we should view Ethereum as a technological module and think about all the applications this technology foundation can support. The most interesting applications will be products that combine on-chain and off-chain elements. This includes ENS, prediction markets, etc.

Prediction markets have on-chain components (that is, assets created for each event that can trade these assets) and off-chain components (one of which is oracles). Sometimes, the design of prediction markets or the matching of trade orders occurs on-chain; additionally, there are aspects involving privacy.

For example, people have been studying cryptographic protocols for decades, aiming to simplify or implement secure electronic voting. Many such protocols often rely on public bulletin boards where people can post information. In this case, they are encrypted ballots, ensuring that everyone can participate. Anything related to privacy must include an on-chain component (for publishing data) as well as an off-chain component (for interpreting data).

If it interprets the data, then it must be done through a private protocol off-chain. Therefore, we talked a lot about L2 (Layer 2). In my opinion, to determine which type of L2 makes sense, you first need to understand which types of L2 are meaningless: if you just copy Ethereum, scale it up by 100 times, and make it more centralized, then it is pointless. I believe that truly meaningful L2s are those where you start examining various applications and ask what off-chain components they need? Besides L1, what other parts do they require? Then you go on to build those things.

What does this mean for Ethereum? We need to scale data, we need the ability to publish more data on-chain. The PeerDAS introduced in last year's recent hard fork has already included this, but we still need to push further. Scaling computational power is also crucial because, as part of the Ethereum chain, scaling computational power can help different applications combine together and communicate without the need for intermediaries.

If you visit the roadmap website (roadmap.org), you can find a roadmap designed for the next five years. The core goals of the protocol in the short term are: first, short-term scaling, continuing to actively raise the Gas limit; second, starting the rollout of zkEVM. zkEVM allows Ethereum to scale more and perform more complex computations while still making it easy to verify on-chain information. There are also preparations for the early post-quantum era. We have been thinking about quantum computing for years, recognizing it as a potential risk, and we have some measures in place. Soon, in the short term, we will improve Ethereum's quantum security and refine the entire roadmap.

For instance, ultimately, all parts of Ethereum will achieve complete quantum resistance while being highly efficient. Additionally, the block building process will be improved, and support for privacy will be strengthened. Therefore, there are many EIP proposals for short-term scaling that will be applied in the next phase, such as Block Access List which can achieve parallelization; Gas repricing can improve efficiency and make raising the Gas limit safer.

ePBS (separation of proposer and builder) makes it safer for Ethereum blocks to take longer to be validated, and also improves the ability to download the state on nodes. There is also EIP-8141 (account abstraction proposal), which is very simple yet very powerful. Essentially, a transaction is a series of calls, where one call may be verification, and another may be execution. This allows Ethereum to natively support smart contract wallets for paying others' transactions, supporting post-quantum signature algorithms and privacy protocols.

So, this makes Ethereum more versatile, supporting many functionalities. Quantum-resistant signature algorithms do exist, having been around for 20 years; we know what they are and how to build them. The issue is that they are not efficient. A quantum-resistant signature takes up 2000-3000 bytes, while current signatures are only 64 bytes.

It also needs to spend 200,000 Gas on-chain, whereas it currently only requires 3,000 Gas. Therefore, there are two types of signatures we can use: one is hash-based, and the other is lattice-based signatures. Our idea is to add vectorization to the EVM, essentially adopting the same logic that allows computers to run artificial intelligence quickly. We are actively working to make signatures resistant to quantum attacks and more efficient.

State storage, account balances, and the execution of smart contracts are relatively easy to scale, but storage scaling is comparatively difficult, and there is still much work to be done; we must strive in this area. So, this is all the short-term and long-term planning, and it is also the direction we truly want Ethereum to develop. Ethereum is not meant to compete with high-frequency trading platforms; it is not intended to be the fastest chain. Ethereum aims to be a secure chain, a decentralized chain, one that remains online continuously and is a chain you can always rely on.

So, one objective is to maximize the assurance of security consensus. This means that if the network is secure, it can withstand 49% node failures and can actually withstand almost all nodes going offline, thereby possessing the same characteristics as Bitcoin. If problems occur in the network, you can still maintain 33% security certainty. This is the first part.

The second part is formal verification of everything. We have already begun to actively apply artificial intelligence to generate code proofs, demonstrating that the operating versions of Ethereum software indeed possess their required characteristics. We have made progress that was impossible two years ago. Artificial intelligence is developing rapidly, and thus we are leveraging this to pursue extreme simplicity, keeping the long-term protocol as simple as possible, and preparing for the future.

Therefore, a network needs to undergo offline testing. If a network needs to be applied, you can rely on it, even when no power outlets are available. Because this is fundamentally the same principle that Bitcoin pursues. If you want to be a holder for the long term, you need to ensure the security of your digital assets over the long term. You need to rely on something that can continuously guarantee security, which does not depend on the ongoing existence of a particular team or its continuous operation.

Ethereum’s consensus combines the advantages of two methods: the longest chain rule of Bitcoin and the BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) method. This is finality, possessing optimal security features, quantum safety, and rapid finality.

Thus, finality is expected to be achieved within one to three block slots, and it is anticipated that the chain will finalize in about 10-20 seconds, even less. zkVM allows you to verify the chain without relying on large computers to run all operations personally. Everyone should verify the chain before you trust it, even your mobile phone and IoT devices should verify the chain. The zero-knowledge virtual machine zkVM is already fast enough to prove that real-time virtual machine execution is feasible. The goal this year is to make them secure enough, starting with a small percentage of the network using zkVM, and gradually increasing this percentage. By 2028, this enables it to scale and handle more transactions without sacrificing decentralization.

What is the vision for these things? Ethereum is a world computer. It is both a global shared layer for making commitments, publishing data, and recording actions; it is a platform for publishing data where it can be proven that data has been published and that data has not yet been published, and it is open for use by everyone; it is also a global shared layer that ensures the execution of high-value rules. Ethereum needs to possess maximum robustness and be extremely easy to verify. I believe that in the future, with artificial intelligence, it will actually become easier, simpler than we imagine, to truly ensure software security.

If you want to ensure software security but people are unwilling to do so, then software vulnerabilities will be 10 times more than before, and the number of attacks will also increase 10 times. Therefore, as a blockchain, Ethereum needs to ensure security first, followed by decentralization.

When these conditions are ensured, we should provide this type of security to users as much as possible. Therefore, if you intend to build decentralized applications, ensure self-sovereignty, security, verifiability, and ensure user participation — this includes finance, decentralized social applications, identity, and a portion of financial and a portion of non-financial applications (including ENS, prediction markets, etc.), covering many aspects. Ethereum can simplify application development, and that is the core goal by default.

The roadmap for the next four years is designed around this goal, thank you!

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