After Hegotá, will Ethereum continue upgrading like it is now?

In a 2030 vision post on September 27, Vitalik Buterin put it very plainly: he wants Ethereum to do more, but he doesn’t want every computer in the network to repeat the same calculations again. The next day, he added that PeerDAS is the starting point for Ethereum to move from “one blockchain” to “something much more powerful,” and that Hegotá might be the last “normal” fork.

Normal refers to the old process. The core developers set a hard fork time, and all nodes switch over to the new rules together. Miners or validators upgrade their clients, and everyone runs the logic in the same way.

This is going to change the way things work.

PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) lets nodes avoid downloading all the data; instead, they only sample and verify part of it to confirm data availability. It sounds technical, but for holders it boils down to one sentence: later, running an Ethereum node will have a lower barrier than it does now.

But the trade-off is that the act of forking itself becomes less “neat.”

Previously, hard forks were like the whole city switching traffic lights at once—at a certain block height, everyone switches simultaneously. Going forward, if the upgrade schedules of the execution layer, the data availability layer, and the consensus layer can be separated, different clients, different rollups, and different validators may be running different combinations of versions. For developers, this means the testing matrix gets more complicated: what used to be testing one chain now requires ensuring compatibility across multiple layers.

For everyday token holders, the most direct change is: you no longer need to worry about whether “this fork will split into two chains,” because the paradigm has shifted away from “a single chain.”

I checked CoinGecko’s trend rankings for September 28. Quant (QNT) is up 55.4% over 24 hours, ranking 33 by market cap. On Binance spot, QNT is up 60.1% over 24 hours, with $250 million in trading volume, and a current price of about $278.95. On the same day, NEAR fell 6.0% and is ranked 21 by market cap; Sei is up 11.5% and is ranked 106.

These numbers don’t have a direct causal relationship with Ethereum’s vision, but they’re all trending at the same time.

The market is re-pricing narratives like “modularity” and “interoperability,” and Vitalik’s 2030 vision article is pushing the same underlying logic down to the base layer.

Back to Hegotá. If it really is the last “normal” fork, then Ethereum’s next upgrades will feel more like software releases than political events affecting the entire network.

This is good and bad news for developers. The good news is that iteration is faster; the bad news is that there are more version combinations you have to keep up with. For token holders, the costs of staking, running nodes, and using L2s will gradually change over time—but it won’t abruptly switch at a specific block height.

On the same day, there are also a few other things you can look at together. U.S. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce left her position on October 2. She had been at the SEC for about eight years and served as head of the Crypto Task Force. A Solana ETF pulled in $188 million in a week—Bitwise took two-thirds of that. On Friday alone, $87 million was added, setting a record.

These have nothing to do with Ethereum’s architecture, but they show that attention from capital and regulation is spreading across more chains.

Ethereum wants to move from “one blockchain” to “a worldwide crypto computer,” provided it no longer requires everyone to solve the same problem. PeerDAS is that step; Hegotá may be the wrap-up of the old process.

As for the phrase “normal fork,” Vitalik used it very accurately. In the future, there probably won’t be a distinction between normal and not normal—only which layer upgrades first and which layer upgrades later.