Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is floating a new kind of decentralized infrastructure between users and Ethereum. One that, unlike the network's Layer-2 solutions, wouldn't itself be a blockchain at all.
- The idea appeared on Sunday, Sept. 27, in a roughly 1,200-word essay outlining Buterin's vision for how Ethereum could evolve into a "cryptographic world computer."
- Buterin argues that Ethereum itself "will never have latency that competes with servers." Infrastructure built around it, however, could.
Vitalik Buterin
No more L2s
The idea follows from a broader change Buterin expects in how Ethereum applications work.
Rather than putting every piece of computation directly on-chain, applications could perform work in parallel or even aggregate it before anything reaches a block, leaving the blockchain itself to handle the parts that require settlement or high-security verification, the Ethereum co-founder said.
And that's completely different from the familiar rollup model, where Layer-2 networks execute transactions separately but remain blockchains themselves.
- Buterin argued that advances in cryptographic proofs increasingly allow decentralized networks to divide up work without forcing users to simply trust whoever performed it.
- That could turn decentralization from something that primarily adds redundancy and security into something that, in some cases, actually improves performance, he wrote.
Vitalik Buterin
So while distributed infrastructure can process computation and store data, cryptographic proofs could be used to verify the result.
Ethereum moves more work away from the chain
Ethereum's Hegota upgrade, planned for 2027, could be its last conventional network upgrade before developers shift toward a much deeper overhaul of how Ethereum works.
The end result, as Ethereum developers envision it, would leave the blockchain as a security and coordination layer while decentralized components perform more of the work outside it.
As Buterin described it, the end state would be an architecture that "combines blockchains with cryptographic privacy and verification, and powerful decentralized off-chain components."
He didn't say, however, when such a non-blockchain intermediary layer could appear, who would build it or what exact architecture it would use.