Buterin says next year’s Hegota is likely Ethereum’s last conventional fork with technology familiar to a 2015 developer. He says later work would involve recursive STARKs, formal verification, optimized consensus and quantum safety; Hegota remains in early planning.
Ethereum.org’s Hegota page lists Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL), which let a validator committee propose transaction lists that block builders must honor, and frame transactions, which let each account use its own verification logic and choose quantum-resistant signatures.
Before Hegota, the network still has Glamsterdam to ship: its Sepolia testnet fork is scheduled for Oct. 6, while Ethereum.org lists a Q4 2026 mainnet launch with no confirmed date. Looking toward 2030, Buterin expects nodes to verify cryptographic proofs and use PeerDAS rather than download and re-execute every block. His targets include 4–8-second slots and 8–32-second finality, compared with about 200 seconds for 12 confirmations in 2015.
