Vitalik: Ethereum should move heavy cryptographic computation to clients, with on-chain only verifying proofs and results

On October 19, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin further elaborated on the EIP-8288 roadmap on X, arguing that neither precompiled contracts nor the EVM are ideal places to host most of Ethereum's cryptographic support, because both rely on data that must be included on-chain, which usually means occupying calldata space in blocks. He said that even with PeerDAS and blocks-in-blobs, data throughput would begin to face real pressure above roughly 8MB/s.

Vitalik argued that Ethereum should be viewed as a "cryptographic world computer," and that content that does not need to be placed in the data and execution "main thread" should not occupy the main thread. For self-contained heavy computation, it can be completed on the client side and a STARK proof generated, then submitted through EIP-8288's recursive aggregation mechanism; on-chain, only the fact that the computation was completed and its result need to be verified, without receiving the raw data and the entire computation process.

He believes this would allow users to flexibly adopt different cryptographic schemes, keep the Ethereum chain lightweight, and avoid continuously adding new precompiled contracts.