vitalik

On October 9, Binance founder CZ posted on X, responding to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's lengthy article about the potential impact of artificial intelligence accelerating mathematical research on cryptographic security. CZ rated Vitalik's mathematical level at 99.99 points, while he rated himself at 0.01 points, joking that together they might achieve something; he also mentioned that people might not fully understand Vitalik's articles like himself, but even so, such analytical discussions are worth reading.Previously, Vitalik warned in a post that the acceleration of mathematical research by artificial intelligence could significantly weaken the practical security of lattice-based cryptography in the next two years, involving technologies such as ML-DSA and fully homomorphic encryption, and could even expose ECDSA to cracking risks sooner than expected. He believes that artificial intelligence could drive mathematical research progress equivalent to the past 50 years within two years, which is why the Ethereum Lean roadmap has gradually shifted towards pure hash signature schemes over the past year, reducing reliance on lattice cryptography.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform, stating that AI-accelerated mathematical research may pose new security threats to existing cryptographic systems, especially lattice-based cryptographic schemes, including ML-DSA and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). He believes that advancements in AI in the field of mathematics over the next two years could significantly undermine the practical security of lattice cryptography, and ECDSA may face the risk of being compromised sooner than expected.Vitalik pointed out that over the past year, the Ethereum Lean roadmap has gradually shifted towards pure hash cryptographic schemes, avoiding the use of lattice-based signatures and related zero-knowledge proof structures. He suggested prioritizing the use of hash cryptography whenever feasible and adopting more conservative security parameters for lattice cryptography; privacy protocols should avoid storing encrypted information directly on-chain, and multi-signature wallets should prioritize off-chain signature confirmations. Additionally, Vitalik advised users, when operationally convenient, to store funds in addresses that have not initiated transactions to reduce potential risks, but he does not recommend users immediately migrate assets on a large scale. He emphasized that the migration process itself also carries risks, and his own losses due to migration errors have even exceeded the losses from past hacking attacks.

Vitalik Buterin retweeted Nethermind's development progress and stated that Nethermind is continuously improving the efficiency and operating speed of Ethereum.Nethermind core developer Ben Adams mentioned that its Beacon Chain plugin has completed synchronization and is ready to handle the Glamsterdam fork on Sepolia; running the Ethereum execution layer and consensus layer as a single application does not seem to incur significant additional memory overhead.The Ethereum Foundation previously confirmed that Glamsterdam will be activated on Sepolia on October 6, and Nethermind 2.1.0 has supported this upgrade.

ChainCatcher live report, at the OKX NOW Global Product and Ecosystem Conference (Singapore), Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that AI has demonstrated strong penetration and offensive and defensive capabilities, with cases emerging of breaking out of sandboxes, attacking websites, and discovering various software vulnerabilities and exploits. "Anything with vulnerabilities will eventually be discovered by AI; GPT-7, Claude 7, DeepSeek 7 will find it."At the same time, AI is also helping the Ethereum protocol discover bugs, implement complex cryptography, and perform formal verification at both the protocol and application layers. Vitalik believes that higher security levels will shift from "optional" to "mandatory," and the industry is in a fascinating yet challenging transitional period.

ChainCatcher live report from the OKX NOW Global Product and Ecosystem Conference (Singapore), where Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech. He stated that AI is both the biggest opportunity and the biggest risk for the current industry development.He believes that the industry is moving beyond the narrative of "blockchain + programmable value," with new features such as "programmable data" realized through zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) emerging.Vitalik expects that privacy protocols on Ethereum will rapidly mature, and within the next two years, most people are likely to use these technologies in an "unperceived" manner.

At the OKX Now 2026 Summit in Singapore, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that AI is demonstrating the ability to break out of sandboxes, attack websites, and discover software vulnerabilities, while also helping the Ethereum protocol identify vulnerabilities, implement complex cryptography, and conduct formal verification.He believes that higher levels of security will become feasible and necessary, as AI will continuously discover exploitable vulnerabilities within systems.Vitalik revealed that about a month ago, he updated ENS information for the first time without using a user interface (UI), only requiring a local AI agent to write a script, which was completed in about 5 minutes. He anticipates that executing complex on-chain operations directly through AI will gradually become the norm, with AI becoming a new user interface in more scenarios.He cited the Safe-related hacking incident involving approximately $1.4 billion in losses as an example, pointing out that the attacks targeted the interaction layer between users and on-chain systems, rather than the on-chain contracts. Directly handling transactions with AI may reduce the risks associated with reliance on web interfaces, but it will also introduce new challenges, including whether the AI itself is secure, whether it can resist prompt injection, and whether it correctly understands on-chain operations. As interaction methods change rapidly, some issues will be resolved, while new security challenges will also emerge.

Vitalik.eth posted on Farcaster revealing that he is conducting a personal experiment to generate personalized diet and exercise recommendations using personal health and travel data by combining local models with remote cutting-edge models while protecting privacy.The system employs a three-layer privacy protection architecture:Identity Layer: A local model (Qwen 3.8B) replaces the user to construct query requests, avoiding the exposure of writing style that could reveal identity.Payment Layer: Uses zkAPI to hide payment information.Network Layer: Hides IP addresses through Tor.The system is currently operational, but Vitalik pointed out three major shortcomings: Tor is inefficient and has high latency in unlinking requests; the local model runs at only 20-30 TPS, and a smooth experience requires over 100 TPS; the stricter the data protection, the more limited the assistance that the remote model can provide. The relevant code has been submitted to the Ethereum zkAPI repository.

According to The Block, the Ethereum Foundation has launched zkAPI on the Ethereum mainnet, a solution co-authored by Vitalik Buterin.zkAPI allows users to pay for artificial intelligence and other APIs using pre-stored ETH or USDC through zero-knowledge proofs, making it impossible for service providers to associate specific requests with the payer.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released the plan for "The Computer of the Crypto World," stating that the Hegota fork scheduled for next year may be Ethereum's last "regular" fork, with subsequent upgrades introducing recursive STARK, automated formal verification, optimized consensus, and quantum security capabilities.He indicated that Ethereum will transition from a blockchain to a hybrid architecture that integrates modern cryptography. This roadmap aims to shorten transaction finality to 8 to 32 seconds, significantly reduced from the current approximately 200 seconds with 12 confirmations, and will adjust verification, consensus, and block construction mechanisms through PeerDAS, SNARK, and FOCIL.

According to CoinDesk, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has released a long-term roadmap, referred to as Streamlining Ethereum. The vision proposes that by 2030, Ethereum will surpass a mere blockchain ledger and plans to completely restructure the protocol in the next three to four years.The transformation includes expanding transaction throughput by approximately 1000 times, introducing zero-knowledge proofs to enhance privacy and combat quantum computing threats. By 2030, the network is expected to accommodate 2TB of traditional dynamic state data, along with an additional 100TB of new scalable storage, to achieve underlying state separation and optimization. The vision also aims to establish Ethereum as an infrastructure driven by cryptographic validation, with applications extending from finance to social systems. Most developers support this plan, although some voices believe the implementation timeline is somewhat delayed.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced today that the original novel "Snowmoon" has been completed, consisting of 32 chapters.The novel unfolds in a speculative science fiction setting, depicting a world that heavily relies on cryptography and decentralized governance. The story focuses on the ideological conflicts between societies such as Veridia and the Arctic Empire, involving elements like zero-knowledge proofs, second voting, privacy technologies, and content-oriented tax mechanisms, integrating themes of mechanism design and digital sovereignty that have long been of interest to Vitalik.The work is released under the GPL v3 license. Vitalik stated that adaptations into films, animations, and other derivative works are allowed, but requires the related production pipeline (including AI prompts, scripts, and other non-generic materials) to be open-sourced. He declared that all text was written by him, with AI assistance only used for spelling and grammar checks, consistency verification, and webpage formatting, and noted "Snowmoon was written with love."

Vitalik posted on the X platform, stating that he attempted to briefly explain the true meaning of the plans for Ethereum that forked after Hegota. Ethereum is no longer just a blockchain; it is a hybrid architecture that combines blockchain with modern cryptography, enabling more powerful features.Related plans include FOCIL, EIP-8288, streamlined consensus, state management, formal verification, memory pool improvements with privacy features, and long-term obfuscation techniques.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that PeerDAS has been running stably for nearly a year with virtually no issues, which is an "underappreciated achievement" by Ethereum client developers.Vitalik mentioned that PeerDAS is a complex task and is the first large-scale blockchain system case to achieve "consensus on data availability without any single node downloading the complete block," realizing decentralized consensus without the need for complete data replication.

Vitalik posted on the X platform stating that synchronizing an Ethereum node now takes only half a day at the fastest, with aggressive settings allowing disk space usage to be below 0.5 TB.EIP-4444 and the client teams' optimizations for snapshot synchronization have significantly improved the synchronization situation. Glamsterdam will further enhance node synchronization, for example, the new synchronization protocol of Nimbus will adopt relevant improvements.

Vitalik posted on the X platform that a new Solidity compiler has been released.It is reported that the new version, built using Zig, was created to avoid waiting for the long 10-minute Solidity compilation process. While maintaining consistent bytecode generation, the compilation speed for some contracts has increased by more than 5 times. The build time has been reduced from 10 minutes to 2 minutes, and the incremental compilation time for large projects has decreased from 700 seconds to 99 seconds.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated in his opening speech at the 2026 Shanghai Blockchain Week that cryptographic technologies such as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), obfuscation techniques, and iO, which were previously considered far from practical, are making rapid progress. Blockchain will also transition from primarily solving "who can send what assets" to an era where it can programmatically determine "who can see what information."Vitalik cited FOCIL (EIP-7805) as an example, stating that the plan involves 16 validators jointly providing a list of included transactions, reducing the ability of a single block builder to censor or delay transactions. He mentioned that in the next five years, more computations will be performed in parallel on user devices, memory pools, and block building stages, and Ethereum will continue to push for the final confirmation time to be significantly reduced from the current approximately 16 minutes to 8-32 seconds.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, delivered a keynote speech at the 12th Global Blockchain Summit, stating that the blockchain was initially a primary tool. Although it has characteristics such as openness, neutrality, and security, it is not scalable and is completely transparent, lacking privacy protection mechanisms.Subsequently, privacy transactions and scalable verification brought by zero-knowledge proofs have changed this situation and have been transformed from planning into actual EIPs, included in the Ethereum roadmap. Technologies such as fully homomorphic encryption are also beginning to be applied, and indistinguishable obfuscation may also be applied on-chain in the future. Beyond privacy, the parallel construction and proof of blocks can make extreme scalability possible, and industry thinking has shifted from digital assets to digital assets plus information, from purely on-chain to user-end, transaction memory pools, a complete pipeline on-chain, and from who can send what to who can see what.Currently, blockchain has gradually evolved from a simple ledger to a cryptography-based secure computing network. With the development of AI, providing cryptographic rules to AI for automated formal verification can significantly enhance verification efficiency, allowing the chain to carry more possibilities.