Vitalik Buterin is building a ‘cypherpunk principled non-ugly Ethereum’ as devs officially add FOCIL to upgrade roadmap

Vitalik Buterin is building a “cypherpunk principled non-ugly ethereum” as part of his future vision for the largest onchain ecosystem.

In response to a post on X arguing that Buterin “should let the original ethereum die a slow and painful death by fragmentation (tempo, reth, l2s, app chains, institutions, etc) and rebuild it as a cypherpunk chain from first principles on risc v just to show who was the boss,” Buterin responded:

“I’m actually trying to do something even more ambitious: Create ‘cypherpunk principled non-ugly ethereum’ as a bolt-on to the present-day system, in a way that’s as tightly integrated and interoperable as possible, and then grow it over time, in the mean time making sure ethereum itself gains the cypherpunk and simplicity properties that just necessarily have to be system-wide (eg. censorship resistance, zk prover friendliness, consensus properties).”

FOCIL inclusion

The statement comes on the heels of the controversial Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) mechanism being officially “scheduled for inclusion” by Ethereum devs on Thursday for the upcoming Hegota hard fork. FOCIL was named as the consensus-layer (CL) headliner for Hegota, which is scheduled for late 2026, following the next Glamsterdam hard fork in the coming months, during Thursday’s All Core Devs call.

FOCIL, entered as EIP-7805, is essentially a bid to ensure Ethereum remains censorship-resistant at the protocol level by forcing validators to include all transactions. It does this by enabling committees of Ethereum validators to enforce transaction inclusion in blocks via fork-choice rules and inclusion lists (IL).

If a proposed block ignores valid transactions from the committee’s ILs — including transactions that may violate OFAC sanctions — the chain forks away from it, guaranteeing that any valid, public-mempool transaction gets included within a bounded number of slots.

FOCIL has been a controversial proposal, and was previously excluded from inclusion in Glamsterdam. Critics argue it could create legal ramifications for Ethereum validators and increase protocol complexity. Still, FOCIL, alongside other protocol improvements, is key to Buterin’s vision for the future of a more cypherpunk and “harder” Ethereum.

Harder Ethereum

In another X post, Buterin noted that FOCIL pairs well with EIP-8141, an account abstraction upgrade also as part of Hegota that would enable native support for smart wallets, multisig, quantum-resistant keys, and gas-sponsored privacy transactions without wrappers.

“With EIP-8141 (AA), transactions from smart wallets, privacy protocols, etc, could be sent *through a public mempool, and directly received by a FOCIL includer*, no wrappers, ‘public broadcasters’, or other intermediaries required,” Buterin wrote. “Ethereum is going hard.”

Both upgrades are part of the Ethereum Foundation’s trilateral goals of scaling, hardening, and simplifying the Ethereum base layer, as laid out in a recent blog outlining “protocol priorities for 2026.”

“Harden the L1 is a new track, and it reflects something we think deserves dedicated focus: making sure that as Ethereum scales and evolves, it retains the properties that make it valuable in the first place,” the authors wrote.

At the same time, Buterin has also pushed to make a “lean Ethereum,” by reducing technological complexity and bloat through a full network redesign. Part of this initiative is the so-called “Beam Chain” that would be ZK-native from the start by enshrining ZK-EVM proofs directly into L1 validation.

Leaner Ethereum

Another part is the long-term goal of swapping out the Ethereum Virtual Machine for RISC-V as Ethereum’s native virtual machine. RISC-V supports compiling a wider range of programming languages like Solidity, Rust, and C, while offering greater ZK support, for the Ethereum execution layer, devs have argued.

All this comes months into a radical refocusing on Ethereum’s base layer scalability and functionality that kicked off last year amid increasing competition from alternative chains like Solana. As part of the reorganization of the Ethereum Foundation, Buterin has become a more vocal leader of the ecosystem, seen by a willingness to back controversial and difficult decisions.

This arguably came to a head earlier this month when Buterin more or less abandoned the “rollup-centric roadmap” he had championed for years, which looked to scale Ethereum through a network of Layer 2s.

Rather than allowing Ethereum to “die a slow and painful death by fragmentation,” from other Layer 1 users of the EVM, like Tempo, or other parasitic chains, Buterin has once again affirmed a decision to build in action.

“Ethereum has already made jet engine changes in-flight once (the merge), we can do it ~4 times more! (state tree, Lean consensus, ZK-EVM verification, VM change),” he said on Friday.

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