Vitalik’s Hong Kong speech: Ethereum’s four-year roadmap advances on three fronts in parallel, with ZK-EVM becoming mainstream

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, in a keynote address on April 20 at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, outlined a development roadmap for Ethereum’s protocol over the next four to five years, with a core focus on short-term scaling, early preparation for post-quantum cryptography, and long-term verification infrastructure centered around ZK-EVM.

Short-Term Goals: Scaling, Account Abstraction, and Early Post-Quantum Readiness

The main upgrade direction for the next hard fork covers three technical pillars:

Scaling: Increase the Gas Limit, introduce parallelized processing, Gas re-pricing, and improvements to node state synchronization. The goal is to significantly boost throughput while maintaining application composability.

Account abstraction (EIP-8141): Define transactions as a call list, with native support for smart contract wallets, gas fee sponsorship (paymaster-style transactions), quantum-resistant signatures, and privacy-preserving protocols, greatly enhancing Ethereum’s generality and security.

Early preparation for post-quantum cryptography: Existing quantum-resistant signature algorithms (including hash-based and lattice-based approaches) have been available for 20 years, but face efficiency challenges—signature sizes are about 2–3 KB, and the on-chain Gas cost is about 200k. Solution paths include optimization directions such as vectorized processing, which is currently under active research.

Medium- to Long-Term Goals: Maximum-Safety Consensus and a Three-Stage Roadmap for ZK-EVM

Long-term goals focus on four dimensions: maximum-safety consensus (tolerating 49% node failures in synchronous networks, while asynchronous networks maintain a 33% finality safety threshold), formal verification (using AI to generate mathematical proofs), comprehensive quantum security, and extreme simplicity.

Three-stage goals for ZK-EVM:

2025: Achieve the “sufficient speed” needed for real-time EVM execution and verification

2026: Achieve the “sufficient security” level used by some nodes (e.g., independent stakers)

2028: ZK-EVM becomes the primary method for chain verification, enabling single-slot finality (1–3 slots, about 10–20 seconds)

The ultimate goal of ZK-EVM is to let lightweight devices such as phones and IoT independently verify on-chain data, completely breaking verification centralization. Buterin also proposed the concept of “foresight testing”: even if the core development team disappears, the protocol should be able to continue running safely and autonomously.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the significance of Ethereum’s EIP-8141 account abstraction?

EIP-8141 defines Ethereum transactions as a series of calls, giving smart contract wallets native support. At the same time, it allows third parties to sponsor Gas fees, integrates privacy-preserving protocols, and replaces existing elliptic-curve signatures with quantum-resistant signatures, greatly improving Ethereum’s flexibility, privacy protection, and long-term quantum security.

How does Ethereum respond to the threat of quantum computing?

Ethereum plans to address this through two paths: in the short term, introduce hash-based or lattice-based quantum-resistant signature algorithms and reduce efficiency loss through vectorized processing; in the long term, build a comprehensive post-quantum security system through ZK-EVM and formal verification. While existing quantum-resistant algorithms are already mature, the main challenges lie in the 2–3 KB signature size and the roughly 200k Gas cost.

What is the practical impact of ZK-EVM on ordinary Ethereum users?

Ultimately, ZK-EVM will allow lightweight devices such as phones and IoT equipment to independently verify on-chain data without relying on centralized full nodes, significantly reducing the risk of verification centralization. At the same time, single-slot finality of 1–3 slots (10–20 seconds) will markedly shorten transaction confirmation times—improving user experience while maintaining decentralized security.