Vitalik Buterin Says AI Could Speed Up Ethereum’s (ETH) Roadmap, But Warns of Security Risks

TLDR

• Vitalik Buterin says AI “vibe coding” helped prototype Ethereum’s full 2030 roadmap in just a few weeks
• He warned the AI-generated code likely has critical bugs and stub implementations
• Buterin proposed taking half the AI speed gains and redirecting them into security improvements
• He laid out a plan to replace Ethereum’s state tree and eventually swap out the EVM for RISC-V
• Ethereum’s next two upgrades, Glamsterdam and Hegota, are both planned for 2026

Vitalik Buterin Says AI Could Speed Up Ethereum’s (ETH) Roadmap, But Warns of Security Risks

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said artificial intelligence is accelerating development on the Ethereum network faster than most people expected.

A developer took up a February bet with Buterin and used AI to prototype Ethereum’s full roadmap through 2030 in just a few weeks. Buterin called it “quite an impressive experiment” on X over the weekend.

He recommended developers take only half the time savings from AI and use the other half on security. That means generating more test cases, formally verifying code, and building multiple implementations of each component.

Ethereum’s State Tree and EVM Overhaul

On Sunday, Buterin also published a detailed breakdown of two major architectural changes he sees as critical to Ethereum’s future.

The first is switching from the current hexary Keccak Merkle Patricia Tree to a binary state tree under EIP-7864. This proposal has been in draft since January 2025.

The binary tree would produce Merkle branches four times shorter than the current structure. Changing the hash function could also improve proving efficiency by 3x to 100x.

Verkle Trees were previously considered for a 2026 hard fork, but quantum computing concerns helped shift interest back toward binary trees around mid-2024.

The second change involves replacing the EVM with RISC-V, the open-source instruction set most ZK provers already use. Buterin first proposed this in April 2025.

Pushback and Next Steps

Researchers from Offchain Labs, the team behind Arbitrum, published a rebuttal in November 2025 arguing that WebAssembly is a better long-term choice than RISC-V for Ethereum’s smart contract format.

Buterin said these two changes together account for over 80% of Ethereum’s proving bottleneck, making both “basically mandatory.”

Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade is planned for the first half of 2026, with Hegota to follow later that year. Developers have not yet finalized the headline EIP for either fork.

The post Vitalik Buterin Says AI Could Speed Up Ethereum’s (ETH) Roadmap, But Warns of Security Risks appeared first on CoinCentral.