Vitalik in HK: Where Ethereum Is Headed in the Next 5 Years

This episode is based on Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's keynote at Hong Kong Web3 Festival, centered on one question: what kind of chain Ethereum is ultimately trying to become. Vitalik framed Ethereum as infrastructure that serves both as a "public bulletin board" and a "shared computation layer," stressing that its core value is not about chasing maximum speed, but about long-term security, decentralization, verifiability, and fair participation.

In the talk, he laid out Ethereum's roadmap for the coming years. In the near term, the focus remains on scaling both data availability and execution, raising the gas limit, advancing zkEVM adoption, improving block building, and using account abstraction to strengthen smart contract wallets, privacy, and support for post-quantum signatures. Over the medium to long term, the priorities shift toward tackling state growth, expanding formal verification, achieving full post-quantum readiness, simplifying the protocol, and making it possible for ordinary devices — including phones and IoT devices — to verify chain state.

Vitalik also emphasized that Ethereum should not become a platform optimized for high-frequency trading. Instead, it should serve as a secure and durable base layer that developers and users can rely on for the long haul, providing a strong foundation for decentralized applications across finance, identity, social, prediction markets, and beyond.

Timeline: 

0:00 Ethereum roadmap backdrop

01:20 Ethereum's two core roles: DA and execution

03:01 Core values: security, verifiability, fair access

03:50 dApps will remain hybrid onchain-offchain

05:21 L2s should not become bigger centralized Ethereums

06:01 Ethereum must scale data and execution together

06:31 The next five years: scaling, zkEVM, post-quantum, privacy

07:39 Next hard fork: parallelization, gas repricing, higher gas limit

08:13 Account abstraction: smarter wallets, gas sponsorship, privacy, post-quantum support

09:50 Mid-term bottleneck: state growth

10:12 Security, formal verification, and AI-assisted proofs

11:47 Ethereum must rely less on core dev teams

13:40 Ethereum's endgame: a global shared layer for rules and data commitments