PANews reported on April 20th that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival that the two core functions of the Ethereum protocol are: as a public bulletin board (applications can publish messages, and everyone can verify the content and order of publication), and as shared digital objects (assets controlled by code, ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, ENS domains, DAO organizational control, etc.). He emphasized that the value of decentralized applications lies in ensuring autonomy, security, verifiability, fair participation, and user aggregation.

Buterin outlined the four-year roadmap, which includes short-term scaling (increasing gas limits, parallelization, and gas repricing), the introduction of ZKVM to support more complex computations, early preparations for post-quantum cryptography (based on hash and lattice-based signature algorithms, which, while less efficient, have existed for 20 years), and account abstraction (EIP-8141) to support smart contract wallets and quantum-resistant signatures. The long-term goals are to maximize secure consensus (withstanding a 49% node failure), formal verification (using AI to generate proofs), extreme simplicity, and quantum security. Final determinism will be achieved within 1-3 slots (approximately 10-20 seconds), and ZKVM will allow devices such as mobile phones to verify the chain, with the goal of achieving large-scale scaling by 2028. Buterin emphasized that Ethereum is not competing with high-frequency trading platforms for speed, but rather aiming to become the most secure and decentralized chain.