Ethereum The next round of expansion breakthroughs, or from making the entire network stop repeating the same calculations

On September 27, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that advances in cryptography could shift decentralization from a performance cost to an expansion advantage. The long-term goal of ethereum is described as the world's computer for crypto, and future architecture will revolve around verifiable computation, data sampling and state management.

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On September 27, as reported by CryptoSlate, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin describes the long-term goal of ethereum in an article as "the computer that powers the cryptographic world". He believes that with advances in cryptography, computation and data can be distributed among different participants, allowing other nodes to verify at low cost whether work is done correctly. Decentralization is no longer just a performance cost for security and robustness, but may become a scaling advantage under limited circumstances.

Traditional blockchains typically require each node to download transactions and repeatedly perform a large number of the same calculations. According to Buterin, Ethereum can delegate more work to specialized participants without requiring every validator to re-execute an entire transaction; distributed networks store more data but also run more computations in parallel, including those around pools within transactions. This idea echoes early concepts of ethereum: In the mid-2010s, developers considered distributing computation among different participants like centralized servers, but the difficulty is verifying that each part was correct.

From recalculation to verification work

Buterin believes that after 2030, ethereum may take a different form than the traditional blockchain system represented by bitcoin. The future validation model will rely more on data sampling and simple cryptographic verification, rather than each validator downloading and executing all content independently. Consensus mechanisms are also moving towards more optimized proof-of-stake design, with block building being shared among multiple participants instead of controlled by an individual for life.

Zero-knowledge technology is already at the center. The first layer zkEVM model proposed by Ethereum allows specialists to execute blocks and generate proofs of correct execution, while other nodes are verified at a lower cost without having to re-execute each transaction. This technology is still in its research phase and has not yet entered production clients.

This separation could allow Ethereum to retain the security gains of widespread validation, while leveraging distributed infrastructure to undertake more computing, storage and privacy processing. Peripheral infrastructures may also compete more aggressively on latency even if the base chain itself does not necessarily match the response speed of a centralized server. Buterin describes the eventual system as a hybrid combining traditional blockchain attributes with cryptographic verification, privacy and downlink components.

Applied economics models are changing

Ethereum scalability also affects application development. On the conventional chain, developers primarily look at how much data or computation is consumed by applications. Buterin expects that as ethereum parallelises work to different participants, the computational structure will become more important: packing a large amount of interdependent computing into one serial transaction can be relatively expensive; breaking it down into components with clear boundaries, which are interoperable and can be aggregated or edited may be cheaper.

In the long run, Ethereum may move towards a model in which information for sorting and non-reorderable state changes is left on the chain. The peripheral computations are processed and aggregated before entering the block.

The situation is becoming more difficult.

Making computation verifiable does not eliminate the need for data acquisition. Buterin points out that managing and parallelizing access to ethereum's growing state is a more systematic problem. State, including account balances, smart contract storage, etc., needs to be used to determine the current state of the network before calculating the next change.

Studies such as weak statelessness attempt to alleviate the burden: most validators can verify blocks without maintaining a complete state database, and block producers still retain the states needed for building blocks and generating witnesses. The proposal is still under study and relies on other architectural modifications. Cryptography has been shown to significantly reduce the cost of checking results, but upstream data needs will not disappear; networks still need to develop reliable ways to store, retrieve and access state in parallel.

2027 upgrades could be the end of old form

This shift is still largely future-oriented. There are several research projects on the Ethereum roadmap that attempt to reduce what ordinary validators need to store or compute, but many technologies remain unfinished.

Buterin said that Hegotá is currently scheduled for 2027, and could be the last of Ethereum's early forms where developers can still identify a normal hash fork. Subsequent upgrades are expected to rely more heavily on recursive proofing, automated formalized verification, consensus optimization and anti-quantum cryptography.

PeerDAS is seen as the beginning of this transition. The next test will be whether Ethereum can allocate more computation without requiring each participant to repeat the same work, and if its state infrastructure can keep up with advances in cryptography that make division of labor possible.