Vitalik Buterin unveils Ethereum's five-year roadmap: focusing on quantum-resistant security, ZK-EVM, and the ultimate resilience of a "world computer."

According to Mars Finance, on April 20th, the first day of the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech titled "The Future Direction of the Ethereum Protocol," systematically outlining Ethereum's technological evolution plan for the next five years. Vitalik emphasized that Ethereum's core positioning is not to compete with high-frequency trading platforms, but rather to become the world's most secure, decentralized, and always-on "world computer"—a globally shared layer that guarantees user self-sovereignty, security, and verifiability. Around this vision, Vitalik broke down the future roadmap into three phases: short-term intensive development, mid-term state optimization, and long-term protocol solidification, focusing on resistance to quantum attacks, zero-knowledge proof verification (ZK-EVM), and the protocol's resilience. Regarding execution layer scaling, Vitalik stated that short-term scaling will be achieved through several EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), including introducing a block-level access list to support parallel transaction processing, recalibrating the Gas pricing mechanism, and implementing ePBS (Execution Block Proposer Separation) to allow for a longer but more efficient block verification process. Furthermore, improvements in node state synchronization will significantly enhance download efficiency. Vitalik particularly emphasized the importance of EIP-8141 (Account Abstraction). This proposal redefines a transaction as a series of calls, thereby natively supporting smart contract wallets, gas fee payment, and more complex privacy protocols at the protocol layer. Regarding quantum security, Vitalik pointed out that while quantum-resistant signature algorithms have existed for twenty years, the main bottleneck lies in efficiency: current quantum-resistant signatures are as large as 2-3KB (compared to the current 64 bytes), consuming approximately 200,000 gas on-chain (compared to the current 3,000). The solution will rely on hash-based signatures and an optimization scheme of "lattice + vectorization" to significantly reduce resource overhead while ensuring security. Vitalik believes that scaling the state layer is the more challenging "deep water." The medium-term roadmap will focus on optimizing the state tree and exploring alternatives that do not rely on permanently storing all historical states to control the infinite expansion of the state size. On a longer timeline, Vitalik believes that by around 2028, ZK-EVM is expected to become the primary method for verifying the Ethereum chain, enabling single-slot finality within 10 to 20 seconds, allowing lightweight devices such as mobile phones to independently verify on-chain data.