The article summarizes the keynote speech delivered by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at the opening ceremony of the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival.
Article by: Crypto Coconut
Article source: Web3 Practitioners
On April 20, 2026, the opening ceremony of the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival reached its climax – Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech, systematically elaborating on Ethereum's core positioning as a "world computer" and revealing for the first time a complete technology roadmap for the next five years. Against the backdrop of accelerated iterations in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and zero-knowledge proofs, this speech anchored a clear direction for the evolution of the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
The following is a reconstruction and interpretation of the core content of the speech.
Redefining Ethereum: A Public Bulletin Board and a Shared Computing Engine
Vitalik begins by posing a fundamental question: What exactly is the purpose of Ethereum?
He condensed the answer into two core functional modules.
First, Ethereum is a "global public bulletin board".
Applications can publish messages here, and everyone can verify the content and order of publication. These messages can be transaction records, hash values, encrypted data, or any information that needs to be publicly anchored. Crucially, applications can use Ethereum as a data publishing layer while simultaneously using other protocols to perform data decryption and computation off-chain—on-chain and off-chain collaboration forming a complete functional loop.
Secondly, Ethereum is a "shared computing engine".
It allows users to own digital objects controlled by code—which can be ERC-20 tokens, NFT assets, on-chain identifiers with practical significance such as ENS domain names, or even governance rights over decentralized organizations (DAOs). The value of these digital objects is not merely theoretical but directly mapped to programmable, transferable, and verifiable on-chain rights.
Vitalik emphasized that the core value anchors of these two functions lie in: autonomous security, verifiability, fair participation, and permissionless user aggregation capabilities. "Self-sovereignty" means that users can participate in and verify the network state solely based on their own infrastructure, without trusting any third party—unless the user actively chooses to do so.
The significance of L2 lies not in "copy and paste", but in supplementing the components below the chain.
Vitalik provided clear criteria for judging the development direction of Layer 2.
In his view, a simple L2 solution that replicates the Ethereum main chain, increases capacity by 100 times, and sacrifices decentralization is meaningless. Truly valuable L2 solutions should start from specific application scenarios, asking what off-chain components each decentralized application needs in addition to L1, and then building those modules accordingly.
He used prediction markets as an example to break down this logic: each event corresponds to an on-chain asset for trading, which is the on-chain part; while oracles provide event results, and some order matching logic is executed on-chain—there are also privacy protection requirements, involving the issuance of encrypted votes and the interpretation of off-chain private protocols. Any application involving privacy must contain an on-chain data publishing layer and an off-chain data interpretation layer, and neither can be dispensed with.
This positioning directly anchors the technical priorities of the Ethereum mainnet: data scaling and computing power scaling must proceed in tandem. PeerDAS was introduced in last year's hard fork, but still needs further upgrades; computing power scaling, on the other hand, helps different applications achieve interoperability without intermediaries.
Five-Year Roadmap: Short-Term Capacity Expansion, zkEVM Deployment, and Post-Quantum Security Preparations
Vitalik directed the audience to the roadmap website (roadmap.org) and broke down the key milestones for the next five years one by one.
There are three core short-term objectives:
- Continuously increase the gas limit and actively promote short-term capacity expansion;
- Launching zkEVM deployment enables Ethereum to handle more complex computational tasks while maintaining lightweight on-chain verification;
- Initiating early preparations for the post-quantum era.
In the field of quantum security, Vitalik frankly stated that the industry is not lacking in solutions—quantum-resistant signature algorithms have existed for 20 years. The real problem lies in efficiency: current quantum-resistant signatures require 2,000 to 3,000 bytes of data (common signatures are only 64 bytes), consuming approximately 200,000 on-chain gas (common signatures consume approximately 3,000). Solutions point to two candidate schemes: hash-based signatures and lattice-based signatures. Ethereum's plan is to introduce vectorized computation into the EVM, leveraging the same underlying logic as AI acceleration to achieve practical efficiency for quantum-resistant signatures.
The specific EIP implementation list in the short term includes:
- Block access list – supports parallel transaction processing;
- Gas repricing – improving efficiency and creating a safety margin for further increases in the gas cap;
- ePBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) – enables validator nodes to maintain security within longer block validation windows;
- EIP-8141 (Account Abstraction Proposal) – The core logic is to split a transaction into a "verification call" and an "execution call", thereby natively supporting smart contract wallets, gas payment on behalf of others, quantum-resistant signature algorithms and privacy protocols, greatly expanding the functional boundaries of Ethereum.
Vitalik specifically pointed out that scaling up state storage (account balances and smart contract execution) is relatively easy, but scaling up the storage layer is more difficult and requires continuous efforts.
Ethereum's positioning clarified: not the fastest chain, but the most reliable chain.
At the end of the roadmap, Vitalik drew a clear line for Ethereum's competitive positioning.
"Ethereum is not designed to compete with high-frequency trading platforms, nor is it designed to be the fastest chain."
Its core mission is to become the most secure, decentralized, and always-on foundational layer —a chain that can be relied upon in any extreme situation. The design goal of its secure consensus mechanism is to maintain network operation even with a 49% node failure, and to recover even after almost all nodes have been briefly offline. Even in the event of serious network problems, it can still maintain 33% security finality.
This security model combines the advantages of Bitcoin's longest chain rule with Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) mechanism, achieving a balance between quantum security and fast finality (completed within approximately 10-20 seconds).
The introduction of zkVM will further lower the verification threshold. Anyone should be able to verify the entire chain—without relying on a mainframe computer to run a full node; even mobile phones and IoT devices should have verification capabilities. Currently, zkVM's execution speed is sufficient to demonstrate the feasibility of real-time virtual machine execution. This year's goal is to achieve a sufficient level of security, gradually switching to zkVM verification starting with a small percentage of the network, and achieving large-scale scaling without sacrificing decentralization by 2028.
Artificial Intelligence and Formal Verification: A Safety Multiplier
One noteworthy incremental variable is the accelerating effect of artificial intelligence on formal verification.
Vitalik revealed that the Ethereum core team has begun actively applying AI to generate code proofs to verify whether Ethereum client software truly possesses all the features it claims. This was an impossible task two years ago, but the rapid evolution of AI is changing that. With the assistance of AI, goals such as achieving ultimate protocol simplicity, maintaining long-term maintainability, and preparing for future uncertainties are becoming increasingly achievable.
He further warned that in the future, if people are unwilling to invest effort in ensuring software security, the number of vulnerabilities could increase tenfold, and the frequency of attacks will rise accordingly. Therefore, Ethereum, as the underlying blockchain, must first ensure security, then decentralization, and pass this security guarantee to upper-layer applications as much as possible.
My Reflections: A Strategic Calibration Regarding "Long-Term Certainty"
As someone working in the crypto industry, I believe the most crucial signal conveyed by Vitalik's speech was not an update to a specific technical detail, but rather a recalibration of strategic focus.
In the narrative game between L1 and L2, the market has long been obsessed with a performance race of "who is faster and who is cheaper," while Vitalik's response has been almost indifferent—Ethereum does not participate in this race. Its core value proposition lies in providing a trusted and neutral infrastructure that spans decades, a global bulletin board and execution layer that can continue to operate even in the face of physical power outages, team changes, and regulatory storms.
The cost of this strategic choice is short-term user experience friction—higher gas costs, slower confirmation times, and more complex interaction processes—while the benefit is "long-term certainty" that no high-performance blockchain can promise. As AI and quantum computing begin to reshape the boundaries of trust in the digital world, only those foundational layers that have done their homework on cryptographic assumptions, formal verification, and decentralized consensus will be qualified to become the anchor of the next era.
Over the next four years, every step of the Ethereum roadmap—from increasing the gas cap to implementing zkEVM and deploying quantum-resistant signatures—will be a practical test of this strategy. For ecosystem participants, understanding the underlying logic of this roadmap is far more valuable than chasing short-term market fluctuations.
Because Ethereum is never betting on the narrative rotation of the next bull market, but on the trust foundation of digital civilization in the next decade.
Disclaimer: This article represents only personal opinions and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute any financial, investment, or legal advice. Market risks exist; invest with caution.
