Ethereum's Future Roadmap Unveiled by Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin at Hong Kong Web3 Carnival 2026

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined the future roadmap for Ethereum over the next five years during his keynote speech at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival. According to Foresight News, Buterin emphasized Ethereum's dual core functions: serving as a 'public bulletin board' for applications to publish messages and ensuring user self-sovereignty, verifiability, and fair participation through shared digital objects controlled by code. The short-term protocol goals include five key areas: short-term scaling, the launch of ZK-EVM promotion, early post-quantum readiness, improvements in block construction pipeline, and privacy support. The next hard fork will incorporate several Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), such as parallelized block-level access lists, gas repricing, extended block verification time for ePBS, and node state synchronization improvements. EIP-8141 (account abstraction) will treat transactions as a series of calls, natively supporting smart contract wallets, gas payment, quantum-resistant signatures, and privacy protocols. Quantum-resistant signature algorithms, existing for 20 years, face efficiency challenges, with signature sizes reaching 2–3 KB and on-chain gas consumption around 200,000 gas. Solutions include hash-based signatures and 'lattice + vectorization' schemes. Mid-term goals focus on the state layer, which is more challenging to scale than the execution layer, requiring state tree optimization and exploring solutions that do not require permanent storage of all states. Long-term protocol goals include maximizing secure consensus (tolerating 49% node failure in synchronous networks and maintaining a 33% finality safety threshold in asynchronous networks), formal verification of all content (using AI-generated mathematical proofs), comprehensive quantum resistance, maximal simplicity, and forward-looking security even without the core developer team (via the walkaway test). Lean Consensus will merge the advantages of Bitcoin-style 'available chain' and BFT-style 'finality' mechanisms, offering quantum resistance and rapid finality (expected within 1–3 slots, approximately 10–20 seconds). By 2025, ZK-EVM is expected to achieve 'sufficient speed' for real-time EVM execution proofing; by 2026, it aims for 'sufficient security' with partial node usage (e.g., independent stakers); and by around 2028, ZK-EVM will become the primary method for chain verification.