Vitalik: Ethereum plans to reduce final confirmation to 8-32 seconds within 5 years

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated in his opening speech at the 2026 Shanghai Blockchain Week that cryptographic technologies such as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), obfuscation techniques, and iO, which were previously considered far from practical, are making rapid progress. Blockchain will also transition from primarily solving "who can send what assets" to an era where it can programmatically determine "who can see what information."

Vitalik cited FOCIL (EIP-7805) as an example, stating that the plan involves 16 validators jointly providing a list of included transactions, reducing the ability of a single block builder to censor or delay transactions. He mentioned that in the next five years, more computations will be performed in parallel on user devices, memory pools, and block building stages, and Ethereum will continue to push for the final confirmation time to be significantly reduced from the current approximately 16 minutes to 8-32 seconds.