Vitalik's full speech at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival: We don't compete on speed; security and decentralization are the core.

PANews Editor’s Note: On April 20th, at the highly anticipated opening ceremony of the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered the keynote speech, providing an in-depth analysis of Ethereum’s ultimate vision as the “world computer” and the hardcore roadmap for the next five years.

Below is the full speech:

Good morning everyone! Where is the Ethereum protocol headed? I believe that over the past few years, we have seen many significant changes in the theory and ecosystem domains. At the same time, we have also witnessed numerous transformations outside the Ethereum ecosystem, including the limitless possibilities brought by artificial intelligence, the potential rapid realization of quantum computing, and advances in formal verification, cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and more.

I think one of the important things we’ve been doing is rethinking what truly matters: what is the significance of using Ethereum? Why Ethereum? What are its features? What makes a decentralized network require these features?

For example, how can we integrate these new technologies into the Ethereum protocol we’ve previously written and into the plans for the next five years? What exactly is Ethereum used for? I believe it has two main functions:

First, Ethereum is like a public bulletin board. It’s a place where applications can publish messages, and everyone can see the content and order of these messages. These messages can be anything—transactions, hashes, encrypted data, or many other things. In fact, there are many opportunities for applications to use Ethereum as a data publishing platform, while leveraging other types of protocols to interpret these data (i.e., decrypt data and perform computations on it).

Second is computation. 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, and their meaning is not limited to the theoretical level (ENS is an example), or even refer to control over organizations (DAO is an example). You can do many things with them, so both functions are highly valuable. For decentralized applications, Ethereum ensures autonomous security, verifiability, fair participation, and brings together all users.

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

Therefore, verifiability and the ability to validate ensure that the chain operates correctly and that everything that happens can be verified as legitimate. It also guarantees the rights of individuals and the actual publishing of information, which can be posted on the bulletin board. So this is core—we should see Ethereum as a technical module and think about all the applications that this technical foundation can support. The most interesting applications will be products combining on-chain and off-chain elements. This includes ENS, prediction markets, and more. Prediction markets have on-chain components (assets created for each event, tradable assets), and off-chain components (such as oracles). Sometimes, the design or trade order matching occurs on-chain, and there are also privacy-related aspects.

For example, cryptographic protocols have been studied for decades with the goal of simplifying or enabling secure electronic voting. Many such protocols rely on public bulletin boards where information can be posted. In this context, they are encrypted ballots, which ensure everyone can participate. Anything related to privacy must include an on-chain component (for publishing data) and an off-chain component (for interpreting data).

If data is interpreted, it must be done off-chain through a private protocol. So, we’ve discussed a lot about Layer 2 (L2). In my view, determining which types of L2 are meaningful first requires understanding which are not: if you just copy Ethereum, scale it 100 times, and make it more centralized, that’s pointless. I believe truly meaningful L2 solutions are those that start to examine various applications and ask: what off-chain components do they need? Besides L1, what other parts are required? Then you build those.

What does this mean for Ethereum? We need to scale data capacity—we need the ability to publish more data on-chain. The recent hard fork introduced PeerDAS, which includes this capability, but we still need to push further. Scaling computational power is also crucial because, as part of the Ethereum chain, increased compute capacity can help different applications interoperate and communicate without intermediaries.

If you visit the roadmap.org website, you can find a roadmap designed for the next five years. The protocol’s core short-term goals are: first, short-term scaling—continue actively increasing the Gas limit; second, begin deploying zkEVM. zkEVM allows Ethereum to expand further, perform more complex computations, and still make verification of on-chain information straightforward. Also, preparations for the post-quantum era are underway. We’ve been thinking about quantum computing for years, recognizing it as a threat, and have taken some measures. Soon, in the short term, we will improve Ethereum’s quantum resistance and refine the entire roadmap.

For example, in the end, all parts of Ethereum will be fully quantum-resistant and highly efficient. Additionally, we will improve block construction processes and strengthen privacy support. Therefore, many EIP proposals for short-term scaling will be applied in the next phase, such as Block Access List enabling parallelization; re-pricing Gas to improve efficiency and make increasing the Gas limit safer.

ePBS (Proposer and Builder Separation) makes block validation safer and enhances nodes’ ability to download state. Another is EIP-8141 (Account Abstraction proposal), which is simple yet powerful. Essentially, a transaction is a series of calls, where one call might be verification, and another might be execution. This allows Ethereum to easily support native smart contract wallets, for pay-for-others transactions, quantum-resistant signatures, and privacy protocols.

This broadens Ethereum’s use cases, supporting many functionalities. Quantum-resistant signature algorithms have existed for 20 years—we know what they are and how to build them. The issue is their efficiency. A quantum-resistant signature can take up 2000-3000 bytes, whereas current signatures are only 64 bytes; they also require about 200k Gas on-chain, compared to just 3,000 Gas now. So, we can use two types of signatures: hash-based and lattice-based signatures. Our plan is to increase vectorization, integrate it into the EVM, essentially applying the same logic that allows computers to run AI quickly. We are actively working to make signatures resistant to quantum attacks and more efficient.

Scaling state storage, account balances, and smart contract execution is relatively straightforward, but storage scaling is more challenging, and there’s much work to do. That’s the direction of all our short-term and long-term plans—what we truly want Ethereum to develop into. Ethereum is not competing with high-frequency trading platforms; it’s not aiming to be the fastest chain. Ethereum aims to be a secure, decentralized chain that remains online continuously—something you can always rely on.

Thus, one goal is to maximize secure consensus. This means that if the network is secure enough to withstand 49% node failures, and can even handle nearly all nodes going offline, it has properties similar to Bitcoin. If the network encounters issues, you should still maintain about 33% security certainty. That’s the first part.

The second part is formal verification of everything. We have also begun actively applying AI to generate code proofs, verifying that the Ethereum software versions indeed possess their intended properties. We’ve made progress—something that was impossible two years ago. AI is advancing rapidly, and we are leveraging this to pursue simplicity, keep long-term protocols as straightforward as possible, and prepare for the future.

Therefore, a network needs offline testing. If a network is to be applied, you should be able to rely on it even without power—this is the same principle Bitcoin pursues. If you want to be a long-term holder, you need to ensure your digital assets’ security over time. You must depend on something that can continuously guarantee security, independent of any team’s ongoing existence or work. Ethereum’s consensus combines the advantages of both: the Bitcoin-style longest chain rule and BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance). This provides ultimate certainty, with optimal security features, quantum resistance, and fast finality.

Finality is achieved within one to three block slots, with the chain expected to reach finality in about 10-20 seconds, or even less. zkVMs enable you to verify the chain without relying on large computers running all operations. Everyone should verify the chain—before trusting it, even your phone or IoT devices should be able to verify. Zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVM) are already fast enough to prove real-time VM execution. This year, the goal is to make them sufficiently secure, starting with small network deployments, then gradually increasing their use. By 2028, this will allow scaling to handle more transactions without sacrificing decentralization.

What is the vision behind all this? Ethereum is the world computer. It’s a global shared layer for making commitments, publishing data, recording actions; a platform for data publication where you can prove data has been published or not, accessible to everyone; and a global shared layer for executing high-value rules. Ethereum must be highly resilient and extremely easy to verify. I believe that with AI, it will become even easier and simpler than we imagine—truly ensuring software security.

If you want to guarantee software security but people are unwilling to do so, software vulnerabilities will increase tenfold, and attacks will become ten times more frequent. Therefore, as a blockchain, Ethereum must first ensure security, then decentralization. When these conditions are met, it should provide this security to users as much as possible. So, if you aim to build decentralized applications, ensure self-sovereignty, security, verifiability, and user participation—covering finance, decentralized social, identity, and some financial and non-financial applications (including ENS, prediction markets, etc.). This encompasses many areas. Ethereum makes application development easier—this is the core goal.

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