Vitalik's 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Summit Speech: Ethereum's Ultimate Vision as the "World Computer" and Future Roadmap

Content Compilation: Odaily Planet Daily

On April 20, 2026, the China Hong Kong Web3 Carnival kicked off at the China Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered the keynote speech, diving deep into Ethereum's ultimate vision as a "world computer" and the hardcore roadmap for the next five years.

Here is the full text of the speech:

Good morning, everyone! Where is the Ethereum protocol heading? I believe that over the past few years, we have witnessed significant changes in both theoretical and ecosystem domains. At the same time, we have also witnessed many revolutions occurring outside the Ethereum ecosystem, including the infinite possibilities brought by artificial intelligence, the imminent realization of quantum computing, and progress in formal verification, cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and other areas.

I believe that one of the important things we have been doing is rethinking what is truly meaningful: What is the meaning of using Ethereum? Why Ethereum? What are its features? What makes it necessary for a decentralized network to have these features?

For example, how to incorporate these new technologies into our existing Ethereum protocol and the plans for the next five years? What is the purpose of Ethereum? I believe it has two main functions:

First, Ethereum is like a public noticeboard. It is a space where applications can post messages, and everyone can see the content and order of the messages. These messages can be of any content, such as transactions, hash values, encrypted data, and many other things. In fact, there are many opportunities for applications to use Ethereum as a place to publish data, while using other types of protocols to interpret this data (i.e., decrypt the data and perform computations on the data).

Secondly, it is a computer. Essentially, Ethereum allows you to have shared digital objects controlled by code. These digital objects can be many things; they can be assets, ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, whose meanings are not limited to the theoretical level (ENS is an example), and can even refer to control over organizations (DAO is an example). You can do many things, so both of these are extremely valuable. For dapps-4607">decentralized applications, Ethereum ensures autonomous security, verifiability, fair participation, and brings all users together.

“Self-sovereignty” essentially means that as a user, you can participate, validate, and ensure your own security, all based on your own infrastructure. You don't need to trust any third party to run Ethereum, and you don't need to trust any third party outside of Ethereum if you don't want to.

Therefore, verifiability and the ability to validate ensure that the chain runs correctly and that everything that happens is verifiable, while also being able to guarantee the rights of anyone and the right to actually publish information to a bulletin board. So, this is key; we should view Ethereum as a technical module and think about all the applications this technical foundation can support. The most interesting applications will be products that combine on-chain and off-chain. This includes ENS, prediction markets, and more.

Prediction markets have on-chain components (assets created for each event that can be traded) and off-chain components (one of which is an oracle). Sometimes the design of prediction markets or the matching of trade orders happens on-chain, and there are also privacy considerations.

For example, for decades people have been researching cryptographic protocols to simplify or achieve secure electronic voting. Many such protocols often rely on a public bulletin board where people can publish information. In this case, they are encrypted votes to ensure everyone can participate. Anything related to privacy must include an on-chain part (for data publication) and an off-chain part (for data interpretation).

If it's about interpreting data, then it must be done off-chain through a private protocol. So, we've talked a lot about Layer 2 (L2). In my view, to determine which type of L2 makes sense, you first need to understand which type does not make sense: if you just replicate Ethereum, scale it up by 100 times, make it more centralized, and that's it, it's meaningless. I think meaningful L2 is: you start looking at various applications, asking what off-chain components they need. What do they need besides L1? And then you go build those things.

What does this mean for Ethereum? We need to scale data; we need to be able to publish more data on-chain. PeerDAS introduced in the recent hard fork last year has addressed this to some extent, but we still need to further this. Scalability of computation is also essential because as part of the Ethereum chain, computational scalability can help different applications interact with each other without intermediaries.

If you visit the roadmap website (roadmap.org), you can find a roadmap designed for the next five years. The protocol's core goals in the short term: one is short-term scalability with continued efforts to increase the Gas limit; the other is the beginning of zkEVM implementation. zkEVM allows Ethereum to scale further, perform more complex computations, while still making it easy to verify on-chain information. There's also early preparation for the post-quantum era. We've been thinking about quantum computing for years, recognizing it as a threat and having some measures in place. Soon, in the short term, we will enhance Ethereum's quantum security and refine the entire roadmap.

For example, in the end, all parts of Ethereum will achieve full post-quantum security and be very efficient. Additionally, improvements will be made to the block building process and enhanced privacy support. Therefore, in the short term, many EIP proposals for scaling will be applied in the next phase. For instance, Block Access List can enable parallelization, Gas repricing can enhance efficiency, and increase the Gas limit making it more secure.

ePBS (proposer and builder separation) makes Ethereum block validation more secure even with longer block times and enhances the ability to download node states. There is also EIP-8141 (Account Abstraction Proposal), which is very simple yet powerful. Basically, a transaction is a series of calls where one call could be validation and another could be execution. This allows Ethereum to easily achieve native support for smart contract wallets, used for third-party payment transactions, supporting post-quantum signature algorithms and privacy protocols.

Therefore, this makes Ethereum more versatile, supporting many functions. Post-quantum signature algorithms do exist and have been around for 20 years. We know what they are and how to build them. The issue is their inefficiency. A post-quantum signature would take up 2000-3000 bytes, whereas current signatures are only 64 bytes;

it also costs 200,000 Gas on-chain versus the current 3000 Gas. Hence, there are two types of signatures we can use: one is hash-based, and the other is lattice-based signatures. Our idea is to increase vectorization, incorporating it into the EVM, essentially employing the same logic as making computers rapidly run artificial intelligence. We are actively working to make signatures quantum-resistant and more efficient.

State storage, account balances, and smart contract execution scalability are relatively easy, but storage scalability is relatively difficult, and there is much work to be done, we must strive in this area. So, this is all the short-term and long-term planning, and this is the direction in which we truly want Ethereum to develop. Ethereum is not meant to compete as a high-frequency trading platform, Ethereum is not meant to be the fastest chain; Ethereum aims to be a secure chain, a decentralized chain that will be online continuously and a chain you can always rely on.

So, one goal is to maximize security in consensus. Meaning that if the network is secure, it can withstand 49% node failure and can actually withstand almost all nodes going offline, thus possessing the same properties as btc-42">Bitcoin. Even if the network encounters issues, you can still maintain 33% security certainty. This is the first part.

The second part is all about formal verification. And we've been actively applying artificial intelligence to generate code proofs, proving that the Ethereum software version indeed possesses its intended features. We have made progress that was not possible two years ago. Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing, so we are leveraging this to pursue ultimate simplicity, keep long-term protocols as simple as possible, and prepare as much as possible for the future.

Therefore, a network needs to be tested offline. If a network needs to be applied, you can rely on it even without a power socket available. Because this is actually the same principle that Bitcoin pursues. If you want to be a long-term holder, you need to ensure the security of your digital assets in the long term, relying on something that can continuously secure your assets, whose security does not depend on the continuous existence of a team or the continuous work of a team.

Ethereum's consensus combines the advantages of two approaches: the Bitcoin-style longest-chain rule and the BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) method. This achieves finality, while also possessing optimal security features, quantum security, and fast finality.

Therefore, finality is achieved within one to three block slots, with chain finalization expected to take about 10-20 seconds, or even less. zkVM allows you to verify the chain without relying on a large computer to personally run all operations. Everyone should validate the chain before trusting it, even your phone and IoT devices should validate the chain. And the zkVM zero-knowledge virtual machine is fast enough to prove that real-time virtual machine execution is feasible. The goal this year is to make them secure enough to start using zkVM on a small scale, then gradually increase that scale. By 2028, this will enable it to scale up, process more transactions, all while maintaining decentralization.

What is the vision for these things? Ethereum is the world computer. It is both a global shared layer used to make commitments, publish data, record actions; a platform where data can be published, proof can be provided that data has been published, and proof that data has not yet been published, and it is open to everyone's use; it is also a global shared layer used to ensure the execution of high-value rules. Ethereum needs to be extremely robust and easy to verify. I believe that in the future, with artificial intelligence, it will actually become easier, simpler than we imagine, and truly ensure software security.

If you want to ensure software security, but people are unwilling to do so, software vulnerabilities will increase tenfold, and the number of attacks will increase tenfold as well. Therefore, Ethereum as a blockchain needs to first ensure security, followed by decentralization.

When these conditions are met, strive to provide this security to users as much as possible. Therefore, if you intend to build a decentralized application that ensures self-sovereignty, security, verifiability, and user participation—this includes financial, decentralized social, identity, and partially financial, partially non-financial applications (including ENS, prediction markets, etc.), covering a wide range of content. Ethereum can make app development easy, and this is the core goal by default.

The roadmap for the next four years is designed around this goal. Thank you!

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