What happened
Vitalik Buterin published a September 27 essay on his personal blog laying out a case that Hegota, Ethereum's next scheduled hard fork, will be the last of its kind. BeInCrypto reported the essay Monday morning, quoting Buterin's framing that the work following Hegota shifts into advanced cryptography and quantum-safe designs rather than the incremental scaling and gas-market patches that have defined recent forks.
Buterin structured the argument as a compare-and-contrast across three snapshots: Ethereum in 2015, Ethereum in 2025, and where he expects Ethereum to sit by 2030. The 2015 version was a small, rough experiment. The 2025 version is a rollup-centric settlement layer with proof-of-stake finality and blob data. The 2030 version, in his framing, is a base layer that leans on zero-knowledge proofs for execution verification and on post-quantum signature schemes for account security.
The essay does not set a fixed date for Hegota's activation. Buterin refers to it as 'next year's' fork, which points at a 2027 window on current cadence. He also stopped short of naming which specific EIPs would ship inside Hegota, leaving that to the All Core Devs process.
Why it matters
Ethereum forks have historically been the calendar around which the rest of the stack plans. Client teams, L2s, staking providers, custodians, and ETF issuers all key off fork timing. Calling Hegota the last 'normal' one is a signal to that ecosystem that the planning horizon after 2027 gets harder, not easier.