V神: Ethereum is about to cut itself open

Today, Vitalik and team released this roadmap, and to put it simply: Ethereum plans to completely disassemble and reinstall itself without shutting down.

With over 200 billion dollars in assets onboard, they plan to replace every plank while still sailing. If this succeeds, by 2029, Ethereum’s ledger will remain the same ledger, but the underlying logic will be entirely renewed.

This is the truly explosive part.

First, what does “single-slot finality” mean? Currently, on Ethereum, a transaction takes 13-15 minutes to be truly settled. During these 15 minutes, the transaction can theoretically be rolled back. Small transfers are no big deal, but if you’re settling a bond, closing a property deal, or transferring tens of millions of dollars—these 15 minutes represent a nuclear-level risk exposure.

The goal of the roadmap is to reduce this 15-minute window to under 2 seconds. Two seconds, essentially instant settlement.

What does this imply? It means Ethereum shifts from “application capable” to “financial capable.”

Next, performance. The current mainnet supports at most 30 transactions per second, nowhere near Visa’s capacity. The goal is for the mainnet to reach 10,000 TPS, with layer 2 solutions scaling to tens of millions. What does tens of millions mean? Real-time reconciliation of each part in the global supply chain, hundreds of millions of IoT devices on the chain, micro-payments of a few cents—things that sound like fantasy now, but by 2029 could become routine.

But what truly keeps the market awake at night isn’t these numbers, but something else.

For the first time in this roadmap, AI has been incorporated into the variables. A developer used AI to create an experimental client, writing 700,000 lines of code in a few weeks, implementing all 65 planned features of Strawmap. Can the code be used directly? Certainly not; Vitalik himself said it’s likely full of vulnerabilities. But the key point is—“Six months ago, this was just a pipe dream.”

People used to dismiss AI code generation as a joke. But if AI can really speed up code creation and vulnerability verification, Ethereum’s roadmap might not need to wait until 2029.

Two years, or even one year, could see the completion of what normally takes three to four.

This is a dimensionality reduction for the market impact. All current narratives based on “Ethereum is slow, so I need to build on Layer 2” will need to be recalculated. The logic behind Layer 2 will lose a crucial foundation, privacy solutions might be directly overtaken by native Layer 1 schemes, and staking yield models will need to change accordingly. Not that everything will change tomorrow, but the valuation anchors are already loosening.

Finally, returning to that philosophical question—after replacing all the planks, is Ethereum still Ethereum?

It sounds abstract, but it’s very tangible for holders. If the underlying components are all replaced—consensus mechanism, cryptography, even the role of validator nodes—are the ETH in your wallet and contracts still the same asset?

The answer is: the ledger hasn’t changed. The balances in your account, the records in contracts, the receipts of past transactions—nothing is lost. The assets onboard the ship are still there, just the ship itself is no longer the original.

This might be the most interesting part of the entire plan—Ethereum is betting on one thing: as long as the assets remain, the consensus won’t break; as long as consensus persists, the price will be recognized.

And if AI really can compress the timeline into two years, the outcome of this gamble might come faster than anyone expects.