Vitalik Buterin says AI could accelerate Ethereum’s roadmap by decades

Vitalik Buterin thinks artificial intelligence just bought Ethereum a couple of decades. Speaking at the Network State Conference 2026 in Singapore, the Ethereum co-founder said AI is speeding up work on the network’s protocol upgrades by a dramatic margin. Without it, he suggested, some of the roadmap’s goals could have taken until 2040 or even 2050 to reach. What Buterin actually said The interview took place on October 9, 2026, and was reported the following day. Buterin’s focus was the Lean Roadmap, Ethereum’s plan to overhaul its core protocol. His central claim: AI is now handling a substantial share of the research and coding that the roadmap requires. That includes some of the hardest work on the list. The standout example is formal verification written in Lean 4. Lean 4 is a programming language and proof assistant used to write mathematical proofs that a computer can check line by line. According to the research summary, AI’s contribution in Lean 4 reduces the need for people to manually audit huge volumes of code. The architecture AI is helping build The roadmap Buterin described is not a minor tune-up. Ethereum is moving toward an architecture built around recursive STA...