Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the network's roadmap, originally developed in 2023, has changed significantly, and in this new era, the priority areas have become quantum security, user privacy, native rollups, and a more compact protocol architecture.
Buterin stated that he compared the Ethereum roadmap from 2023 with the current "preliminary map" and found that while a significant portion of the core goals remains the same, the order of some topics has changed, and some technologies have been replaced with more advanced alternatives.
Accordingly, ensuring security against quantum computers has received higher priority, while VDF and some EVM improvements have been pushed back. The replacement of Verkle trees with a "unified BT," then with the "PBT" approach, as well as the transformation of the state expiry concept into a new "state kinds" architecture, were noted as significant changes to the roadmap.
According to Buterin, the most significant change is the inclusion in Ethereum's long-term plans of some new technologies that were not foreseen at all in the 2023 roadmap.
The focus of these areas is ensuring strict user privacy. Buterin noted that Ethereum developers are working on mechanisms for key nonces and new root account mechanisms, some FOCIL components, limited privacy pools, and structures called "wormholes," indicating that privacy is now one of the issues directly receiving priority attention at the protocol level.
An important direction of the new roadmap is also the efforts to scale in the post-quantum era. Within Ethereum, post-quantum signatures based on leanSPHINCS, signature aggregation, and new structures called "zkzk frames" are being evaluated. The goal is to make Ethereum resilient in the long term to the risks that quantum computers may pose to existing cryptographic signature systems.
Ethereum also seeks to expand the use of "formal verification" by simplifying the protocol specification. Buterin stated that formal verification of the entire protocol has become more feasible thanks to modern AI tools, and that AI-based formal verification systems could play a fundamental role in Ethereum's technical future.
The new roadmap also includes mechanisms not yet on the 2023 agenda, such as "blob futures" and "gas futures." Furthermore, advancements in SNARK technologies have enabled considering native rollups as a direct part of the Ethereum protocol.
Buterin also noted that a clearer vision has emerged for the long-term future of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). He stated that the structure of zkzk frames might require the protocol to provide users with an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) different from the EVM, and that leanISA and RISC-V are currently the leading candidates.
Buterin stated that these architectures are simpler, more modern, and more efficient compared to the EVM, and that in the future, the EVM could be transformed into an intermediate representation layer running on top of a lower-level instruction set architecture, rather than a complex structure directly embedded in the base protocol. However, he added that work in this direction is still at its earliest stages.
Ethereum's approach to scaling is also undergoing a significant paradigm shift. According to Buterin, the goal is no longer to scale all network operations to the maximum degree using the same method. Instead, specialized mechanisms are being developed for frequently used transaction types, such as token transfers, decentralized exchange transactions, and privacy protocols, which are expected to see widespread adoption in the future, providing more limited but much higher scalability.
Buterin stated that STARK technologies and AI-based formal verification systems are now considered "first-class" components in Ethereum's technical future. He noted that recursive STARK structures are planned to be used at multiple protocol levels, and that the same verification primitive could be used at three different levels: the execution layer (EL), the consensus layer (CL), and the data layer (DL).
The Ethereum co-founder argued that the secure implementation of such critical cryptographic structures is only possible through formal verification, and that modern AI tools have made this process feasible.
Buterin summarized Ethereum's long-term goals, highlighting them as follows: quantum security, user privacy, censorship resistance, high performance, and scalability.
"Ethereum will be quantum-resistant. ETH will prioritize user privacy. Ethereum will be secure, censorship-resistant, high-performance, and scalable. And Ethereum will be economical," he stated.
*This is not investment advice.
