Vitalik: The next hard fork of Ethereum will include multiple EIPs, with a mid-term focus on the state layer

ME News Report, April 20 (UTC+8), Foresight News coverage, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote titled “The Future Direction of the Ethereum Protocol” at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, revealing the roadmap for Ethereum’s next five years. “Ethereum has two core functions: as a ‘public bulletin board’ allowing applications to publish messages visible to everyone along with their order, and providing computational capability to run shared digital objects controlled by code, aiming to ensure user sovereignty, security, verifiability, and fair participation. The short-term core protocol goals include five items: scalability expansion, launching ZK-EVM promotion, early post-quantum readiness, improving block construction pipelines, and privacy support. Regarding scalability expansion, the next hard fork will include multiple EIPs, such as implementing parallelized block-level access lists, gas re-pricing, enabling block validation to take longer with ePBS, and node state synchronization improvements. EIP-8141 (Account Abstraction) will treat transactions as a series of calls, natively supporting smart contract wallets, gas sponsorship, quantum-resistant signatures, and privacy protocols. Quantum-resistant signature algorithms have existed for 20 years, with main issues being efficiency: signature size reaching 2-3 KB (currently 64 B), on-chain gas consumption around 200,000 Gas (currently 3,000 gas). Solutions include hash-based signatures and ‘lattice + vectorization’ schemes. The mid-term focus is on the state layer: execution layer scalability is relatively easier, but state layer scalability is more difficult, requiring state tree optimization and exploring solutions that do not require permanently storing all states. The long-term protocol goals include five items: maximizing secure consensus (tolerating 49% node failures in synchronous networks, maintaining 33% finality security threshold in asynchronous networks); formal verification of all content (already starting to use AI-generated mathematical proofs); full quantum resistance; maximum simplicity; and maximum foresight, ensuring protocol security even if the core development team no longer exists (via walkaway tests). Lean Consensus will combine the advantages of Bitcoin-style ‘usable chain’ and BFT-style ‘finality,’ offering quantum resistance and fast finality (expected within 1-3 slots, about 10-20 seconds for final confirmation). Regarding ZK-EVM, by 2025, it will be ‘fast enough’ to prove EVM execution in real-time; by 2026, the goal is ‘secure enough’ and to start enabling a small subset of nodes (such as independent stakers) to use it; around 2028, ZK-EVM will become the primary method for validation chains.” (Source: Foresight News)