Vitalik: Ethereum's future focuses on security, decentralization, and scalability, not on competing with high-frequency trading platforms.

Techub News reports that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined the development direction of the Ethereum protocol for the next five years at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival. He pointed out that Ethereum's core functions include: serving as a "public bulletin board" for applications to publish data, and providing shared digital objects controlled by code (such as ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, ENS, DAOs, etc.), ensuring user self-sovereignty, verifiability, and fair participation. Vitalik emphasized that meaningful Layer2 should include off-chain components, rather than simply replicating and centrally amplifying Layer 1.

Vitalik stated that Ethereum's short-term scaling plans include actively increasing the Gas limit, launching ZKEVM to support more complex computations, early preparations for post-quantum cryptography, improving the block building process, and enhancing privacy support. Regarding the long-term vision, Vitalik said: "Ethereum is not meant to compete with high-frequency trading platforms, but to become a secure, decentralized chain." He proposed core goals including: maximizing secure consensus, performing formal verification on everything and utilizing AI to generate proofs, pursuing ultimate simplicity and passing the "exit test" (safe operation even without a continuous development team), achieving quantum security, and achieving fast finality within 10-20 seconds.