Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says advances in cryptography could allow the network to scale by distributing work among more participants, rather than requiring every node to repeat the same calculations.
In a Sept. 27 essay, Buterin described Ethereum’s long-term goal as a “cryptographic world computer”. Under that model, computation and data would be spread across specialised participants, while compact cryptographic proofs would allow other users to verify the results efficiently.
That would represent a major change from the traditional blockchain design, in which every node downloads transactions and performs much of the same computation. Buterin said decentralisation could eventually become a performance benefit rather than simply a cost accepted for security and resilience.
“Perhaps the most important shift” is that decentralised systems may be able to store more data and run more calculations in parallel, including activity linked to the transaction mempool, he wrote.
From repeated computation to verified work
The idea revives an ambition considered by Ethereum developers in the mid-2010s: dividing computation between participants in a way similar to how centralised systems distribute workloads across servers. The difficulty was proving that each participant had completed its assigned task correctly.
Buterin said modern cryptographic proofs are increasingly able to provide that assurance, while the computational cost of producing and checking them continues to fall.
Ethereum’s proposed L1 zkEVM model is central to that direction. A specialised prover would execute a block and produce proof that it had been processed correctly. Other nodes could then verify the proof far more cheaply than executing every transaction again. The technology remains under active research and is not yet part of production Ethereum clients.
The wider roadmap is intended to make Ethereum around 2030 fundamentally different from the blockchain systems that emerged with Bitcoin. Verification would rely more on data sampling and succinct proofs, rather than asking every validator to download and execute everything. Ethereum is also moving towards a more efficient proof-of-stake design, while block construction is expected to involve multiple participants rather than one producer.
If successful, the network would increasingly separate the roles of performing computation and checking it. Buterin said that could preserve broad verification while allowing distributed infrastructure to provide more computation, storage and potentially privacy. Services built around Ethereum could also compete more closely with centralised systems on latency, even if the base chain itself remained slower than centralised servers.
The resulting system would combine conventional blockchain features with cryptographic verification, privacy technology and decentralised components operating away from the base chain.
Applications may need to adapt
The change could affect how developers design applications. Instead of focusing only on the total data or computing power an application uses, they may also need to consider how its workload is organised.
Large, interdependent calculations packed into one serial transaction could become more expensive. By contrast, tasks split into clearly defined sections that can be run in parallel, aggregated or removed could become cheaper.
That would encourage applications to use independent dependencies rather than treating Ethereum as one machine carrying out arbitrary operations sequentially. Over time, information needed for ordering and unavoidable state changes could remain onchain, while surrounding computation was processed and aggregated before entering a block.
Buterin said this remains a prospective model. Several parts of Ethereum’s roadmap aim to reduce what ordinary validators must store or calculate, but many of the required technologies are unfinished.
State remains the central challenge
Cryptographic proofs can make computation cheaper to verify, but they do not remove the need to access the data on which that computation depends. Buterin identified Ethereum’s growing state as the more difficult systemic problem.
State includes account balances, smart-contract storage and other information needed to establish the network’s current condition before a new transition can be calculated.
Weak statelessness is one proposal being researched. It would allow most validators to verify blocks without holding the complete state database, while block producers retained the information needed to create blocks and generate witnesses. The proposal depends on further changes to Ethereum’s architecture.
Buterin said Ethereum has potential solutions, although the designs will need to develop alongside future applications.
He added that Hegota, planned for 2027, could be the last “normal” fork familiar to developers from Ethereum’s earlier era. Later upgrades are expected to rely increasingly on recursive proofs, automated formal verification, optimised consensus and quantum-resistant cryptography.
PeerDAS has already begun that transition. The next test will be whether Ethereum can distribute substantially more computation without forcing every participant to repeat it, while ensuring its state infrastructure can keep pace.
