Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin used his keynote at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival on April 20 to lay out a five-year technical roadmap that prioritizes quantum resistance, parallel execution, and faster finality over raw throughput gains. The address came as ETH traded at $2,404, with a $2...
"Ethereum needs to prioritize security first, followed by decentralization." — Vitalik Buterin, Co-Founder, Ethereum
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin used his keynote at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival on April 20 to lay out a five-year technical roadmap that prioritizes quantum resistance, parallel execution, and faster finality over raw throughput gains. The address came as ETH traded at $2,404, with a $233 billion market capitalization — well below Bitcoin's $1.33 trillion — and amid criticism that Ethereum's Layer 1 has ceded fee revenue to its own Layer 2 ecosystem. Ethereum generated roughly $10.3 million in transaction fees over the past 30 days, placing it behind both Tron and Solana on that metric.
The roadmap centers on two hard forks scheduled for 2026 — Glamsterdam in H1 and Hegotá in H2 — alongside a longer-term push to make the network resistant to quantum computing attacks before 2030. Buterin framed Ethereum not as a payments network competing on transactions per second, but as a "world computer" serving two functions: a "public bulletin board" and a shared computational platform for code-controlled digital assets. The implicit contrast with Solana's 5,500+ TPS throughput was unmistakable, though Buterin did not name competitors directly.
Buterin's 2026 Hong Kong address was notably defensive in tone compared to previous appearances. He explicitly rejected framing Ethereum as a speed-optimized chain, instead describing its two core functions: acting as a "public noticeboard" where applications publish messages visible to all participants, and operating as a shared computer enabling code-controlled digital objects including tokens, NFTs, and DAOs.
The address was delivered at the China Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center on April 20, 2026, at the opening of the four-day Hong Kong Web3 Carnival. Other speakers at the event included Binance co-founder Yi He, Tron founder Justin Sun, and Solana Foundation President Lily Liu, according to the event organizers.
Buterin stated directly that Ethereum "will not sacrifice security for speed," a formulation that implicitly positions faster chains as having made that trade-off. He defined Ethereum's value proposition as "autonomous security, verifiability, and fair participation for decentralized applications" — language that maps to the economic-value framework where protocol revenue durability depends on providing irreplaceable infrastructure rather than competing on commodity throughput.
The first of two planned 2026 hard forks, Glamsterdam, is targeted for May–June 2026, though the Ethereum Foundation has cautioned this timeline depends on testnet validation. Devnet-4 testing is complete and Devnet-5 is underway.
Two "headliner" EIPs define the upgrade:
EIP-7732 (Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation / ePBS): Moves the proposer-builder separation mechanism — currently handled by third-party relayers like Flashbots — into the protocol itself. This aims to make block verification more secure and reduce centralization pressure in MEV extraction. The Base engineering team has publicly warned that adding FOCIL (Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists) alongside ePBS could delay the upgrade beyond 2026.
EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists): Enables parallel transaction execution by declaring which state each transaction will access before execution. This is the technical foundation for raising the Gas limit toward 100 million, up from the current 60 million — itself a figure that was increased from 30 million in late 2025, the first significant increase since 2021.
Additional EIPs under consideration include EIP-7904 (gas repricing to align costs with actual computational resources), EIP-8011 (multidimensional gas metering), and EIP-8032 (size-based storage gas pricing). Over 25 non-headliner EIPs are being evaluated for inclusion, according to the Ethereum Foundation's February 2026 protocol priorities update.
Vitalik Buterin outlined eight EIPs defining the upgrade's full scope in late February 2026. The Gas limit target of 100M+ represents a potential 5x increase from early 2025 levels, a figure Buterin has cited as necessary to "bridge the Solana gap" on Layer 1 capacity.
The second 2026 hard fork, Hegotá, targets continued advancement in three areas: censorship resistance (via EIP-7805 / FOCIL if it misses the Glamsterdam window), native account abstraction, and post-quantum security hardening.
EIP-8141 (Account Abstraction / Frame Transactions): Proposed by Buterin in February 2026, this EIP enables native smart contract wallet support, third-party transaction sponsorship, post-quantum signature algorithms, and privacy protocols. The goal, per the Foundation's priorities document, is making "smart contract wallets the default" rather than the externally owned accounts (EOAs) that dominate today.
Account abstraction is a prerequisite for quantum resistance migration because it allows accounts to change signature schemes without changing addresses — preserving compatibility with existing smart contracts and deployed infrastructure.
Buterin devoted significant keynote time to quantum resistance preparations, citing specific technical constraints that illustrate why this is an engineering challenge rather than a theoretical concern.
Current ECDSA signatures on Ethereum require 64 bytes and cost approximately 3,000 Gas for on-chain verification. Post-quantum alternatives — specifically lattice-based (CRYSTALS-Dilithium / FIPS 204) and hash-based (SPHINCS+ / FIPS 205) signatures standardized by NIST in August 2024 — require 2,000–3,000 bytes per signature and cost approximately 200,000 Gas for verification.
That represents a 66x increase in Gas cost per signature verification. At current Ethereum L1 fee levels averaging $0.16–$0.22 per transaction, a 66x multiplier on the signature component alone would materially increase costs and reduce effective throughput.
The Ethereum Foundation's approach involves:
The Foundation's roadmap targets full quantum resistance across all protocol layers before 2030. Buterin described quantum preparations as coming "soon, in the short term," while acknowledging that efficient implementation remains the binding constraint.
Ethereum's current finality time — the point at which a transaction is considered irreversible — runs approximately 12–15 minutes under the Gasper consensus mechanism. Buterin set a medium-term target of 10–20 seconds, achieved within one to three block slots.
The consensus approach combines Bitcoin's longest-chain rule with Byzantine Fault Tolerance methods, a hybrid that Buterin argued provides stronger security guarantees than either mechanism alone. The finality reduction would bring Ethereum closer to Solana's sub-second confirmation times, though still meaningfully slower.
This matters primarily for institutional adoption. Current 12-minute finality windows create settlement risk that traditional finance participants find unacceptable for large-value transfers. A 10-second finality window would make Ethereum competitive with existing RTGS (Real-Time Gross Settlement) banking systems that typically settle within seconds.
The Ethereum L2 ecosystem illustrates a strategic tension embedded in Buterin's "world computer" framing. Layer 2 networks collectively hold over $34 billion in TVL and process roughly 2 million daily transactions — approximately double Ethereum mainnet volume.
Individual L2 metrics as of April 2026:
The 2025 upgrades — Pectra (May) doubling blob throughput and Fusaka (December) delivering an 8x increase in theoretical blob capacity via EIP-7594 (PeerDAS) — reduced L2 fees substantially. L2 fees dropped 40% post-Pectra to $0.10–$0.50, with further 50–70% reductions expected through 2026.
The paradox: as L2s become cheaper and faster, economic activity migrates away from Ethereum L1, reducing L1 fee revenue. Ethereum generated just $10.3 million in transaction fees over the past 30 days, behind Tron and Solana. Ethereum's record daily transaction count hit 2.89 million on January 16, 2026, but average daily volume runs approximately 1.2 million — while L2s collectively process multiples of that.
Buterin's roadmap implicitly accepts this trade-off. The zkEVM initiative — advancing from prototype toward production readiness according to the February 2026 priorities update — aims to make L1 verification of L2 computation cheaper and more expressive. By 2028, the Foundation targets zkVM technology that would enable mobile phones and IoT devices to verify on-chain state without running full operations.
The economic bet is that Ethereum L1 captures value as a settlement and verification layer, even as execution revenue flows to L2s. Whether that value capture justifies the current $233 billion market capitalization remains the central question for ETH holders.
ETH traded at $2,404 on April 22, 2026, with a $233 billion market capitalization. ETH dominance stands at approximately 8.6% of total crypto market capitalization, down from higher levels in prior years.
Ethereum mainnet fees averaged $0.16–$0.22 per transaction in March 2026, down from $0.41 in February 2025 — a 95% reduction from peak levels. For context, Solana's average transaction costs $0.00025, roughly 640–880x cheaper than Ethereum L1.
The Ethereum Foundation's own priorities document, published February 18, 2026, listed three development tracks led by named individuals: Scale (Ansgar Dietrichs, Marius van der Wijden, Raúl Kripalani), Improve UX (Barnabé Monnot, Matt Garnett), and Harden the L1 (Fredrik Svantes, Parithosh Jayanthi, Thomas Thiery). The organizational clarity suggests institutional maturation, though critics note that the Foundation's structure increasingly resembles the corporate governance Ethereum was designed to replace.
Buterin's Hong Kong keynote was a statement of strategic intent: Ethereum will compete on security, verifiability, and composability rather than raw speed. The five-year roadmap is technically ambitious — parallel execution, quantum resistance, 10-second finality, and zkVM deployment represent substantial engineering challenges with uncertain timelines.
The economic question is whether the "world computer" framing generates sufficient fee revenue to support a $233 billion valuation. Current L1 fee data suggests it does not — $10.3 million over 30 days annualizes to approximately $125 million, well below even modest revenue expectations for an asset of this size. The bull case rests on L2 ecosystem growth eventually flowing value back to L1 through settlement fees and ETH demand for gas. The bear case is that Ethereum has effectively commoditized its own execution layer.
The next concrete data point arrives with Glamsterdam's deployment, expected in May–June 2026. If the Gas limit increase to 100M+ proceeds without stability issues, it validates the parallel execution approach. If it slips — as the Base team has warned is possible — the timeline for the remainder of the roadmap compresses further.