The Ethereum news worth reading this weekend came from Vitalik Buterin’s own blog rather than a price feed. In an essay published on 27 September titled “The Cryptographic World Computer”, the Ethereum co-founder set out where the protocol is heading by 2030, and drew a hard line at the next scheduled fork. Ether traded around $2,648 on Monday, down about 1.5% on the day and up roughly 8% over the past month.
The headline for anyone holding or building on the chain is settlement speed. Buterin put Ethereum’s 2030 target at “~4-8s for a slot, ~8-32s for finality,” against the roughly 15 minutes a block takes to finalize today.
Hegota Is the Line Buterin Drew, and He Calls It the Last “Normal” Fork
The sharpest claim in the essay concerns the upgrade after next. “Hegota, the fork planned for next year, is likely to be Ethereum’s last ‘normal’ fork, with features and technology that would be recognizable to someone in 2015,” Buterin wrote. Everything past that point, in his framing, stops resembling the upgrades the network has shipped so far.
What replaces them is a different class of engineering. Buterin listed what comes after Hegota as work involving “recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus algorithms, and making it all quantum-safe.” The essay frames the whole exercise as a move away from Ethereum as a ledger where computation gets dumped and executed, toward what he calls a hybrid construction that combines the blockchain with cryptographic verification, privacy, and decentralized off-chain components.
Block verification itself changes character, going from full re-download and recompute to SNARK verification paired with PeerDAS, which is already live. Authorization moves the same way, from a plain signature today to a quantum-safe signature or a zero-knowledge proof, and light clients move from verifying consensus alone to verifying validity as well.
Finality Goes From About 15 Minutes to 8-32 Seconds
Finality is the point at which a transaction can no longer be reversed without an attacker destroying an enormous amount of staked value, and on Ethereum today it takes about 15 minutes for a block to finalize. Slots currently run at 12 seconds each, with 32 slots to an epoch. Buterin’s 2030 figures compress both, to 4-8 second slots and 8-32 second finality.
For traders the consequence is capital efficiency rather than throughput. Exchange deposit crediting, bridge transfers, and L2 withdrawal windows are all keyed to how long the base layer takes to become irreversible, so cutting a 15-minute wait to under half a minute frees collateral that currently sits idle between confirmation and settlement. Notably, the essay carries no transactions-per-second target, no gas limit figure, and no L1 throughput number, so this is a latency roadmap rather than a scaling one.
Investor Takeaway
Cutting Ethereum finality from roughly 15 minutes to under 32 seconds would mostly free up collateral idling in bridges, exchange deposits and L2 withdrawal windows.
Buterin’s New Numbers Are Slower Than the Strawmap Targets From February
The 2030 figures are a step back from what Buterin floated earlier this year. His “Strawmap” vision, which set out a path to 2-second slots through a sqrt(2) ladder and 6 to 16 second finality using a consensus algorithm called Minimmit, was more aggressive on both counts than the 4-8 second slots and 8-32 second finality in this essay.
That gap is the most useful detail in the document and it has gone largely unremarked. Buterin labelled the Strawmap a deliberately revisable strawman, so a softening breaks no promise, though the direction of travel matters for anyone modelling when Ethereum becomes competitive on settlement speed. The earlier roadmap also carried a 10,000 transactions per second zkEVM ambition for L1 that this essay does not repeat. Upgrade cadence has meanwhile held, with Glamsterdam the nearer milestone before Hegota arrives.
What Ethereum News Coverage Got Wrong, Including a 2029 Quantum Deadline
Several claims circulating in Ethereum news coverage of this essay are not in it, and the gap matters because the essay is short enough to check. There is no December 2029 deadline for quantum-resistant execution, consensus and data layers. Buterin writes only that post-Hegota work involves “making it all quantum-safe,” without attaching a date to it. The essay also contains no line reading “it’s really not just a blockchain anymore,” and the comparison it draws is against 2015 Ethereum, at roughly 17 seconds a block and 200 seconds for 12 confirmations, rather than against current performance.
None of this is a roadmap for the ether price, and Buterin has been explicit in rejecting calls for the Ethereum Foundation to support ETH. With ether down about 11% year to date and trading near $2,648, the near-term tape still answers to flows rather than roadmaps, and FinanceFeeds’ $3,000 bull versus $2,200 bear case on ETH turns on ETF demand rather than fork schedules.
Investor Takeaway
The December 2029 quantum-resistance deadline circulating in coverage of Buterin’s essay does not appear in the essay, which commits to quantum-safety without a date.
