Vitalik Buterin: Without AI, Ethereum's remaining roadmap could take 20 years. On November 4, 2026, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) stated in an interview with Moneycontrol (@moneycontrolcom) that Lean Ethereum is a series of upgrades Ethereum will push forward over the next few years, aiming to make zero-knowledge proofs and AI as widely as possible. He said that these technologies were previously only placed at the application layer, as there were too many risks in putting them into the mainnet's underlying layer, but now the technology is mature. He stated that AI is what makes it so much faster, especially using AI to assist in formal verification to confirm the security of newly written code. Source: Moneycontrol