Ethereum's Hegotá Upgrade May Be Final 'Conventional' Hard Fork, Vitalik Buterin Suggests
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder, indicated that PeerDAS represents the beginning of Ethereum's evolution "from being just a blockchain to being something much more powerful."
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has indicated that the network's upcoming Hegotá upgrade may represent the final "normal" fork prior to the development focus pivoting toward advanced technologies such as recursive STARKs, optimized consensus mechanisms, automated formal verification, and quantum-safe cryptography.
In statements made on Sunday, Buterin suggested that Hegotá, scheduled for deployment in 2027, will likely serve as the last upgrade containing features and technological components that would remain familiar to individuals who understood Ethereum back in 2015.
According to Buterin, PeerDAS—a technology enabling nodes to confirm data availability through sampling data portions instead of downloading complete datasets—represents the starting point of Ethereum's transformation "from being just a blockchain to being something much more powerful."
The transition was characterized by Buterin as Ethereum's development into a "cryptographic world computer," shifting away from a framework where nodes merely download and re-execute transactions and moving toward an infrastructure that combines blockchains with decentralized offchain components, privacy features, and cryptographic verification.
This transformation has the potential to fundamentally alter the construction of Ethereum applications by relocating additional computation offchain while utilizing the base layer for verifying results, settling transactions, and maintaining access to shared onchain state.
What Ethereum's 'world computer' could look like
The post from Buterin sparked considerable discussion regarding how much state and computation should eventually migrate offchain, and which functions Ethereum itself ought to continue managing directly as the network undergoes this evolution.
Barnabé Monnot, a researcher working on Ethereum, explained that relocating computation offchain while proving and committing to the results onchain has the potential to substantially decrease the work demanded from the network and make lighter nodes possible.
Despite this, Monnot contended that a "world computer" should still maintain critical records that its applications rely upon directly onchain. According to him, this approach would enable users to observe what is taking place and engage with applications directly, eliminating dependence on intermediaries or external servers.
A pseudonymous commentator known as Cryptographic suggested that this architecture has the potential to broaden what decentralized finance (DeFi) applications are capable of achieving by permitting more sophisticated computation to take place outside smart contracts while Ethereum confirms that the resulting transactions adhere to protocol rules.
According to Cryptographic, DeFi lending represents one such example, where activities like collateral analysis, matching borrowers and lenders, or liquidation routing could be performed outside the chain before Ethereum settles and verifies the outcome.
Gabriel Shapiro, a crypto lawyer, raised questions about the level of demand that exists for proof-based systems when compared with traditional trust-based models. His argument was that numerous existing financial services depend on legal enforcement, regulation, and reputation instead of continuous cryptographic verification.