Vitalik Rearranges Ethereum Roadmap Focusing on Privacy and Quantum Resistance
Vitalik Buterin compared the 2023 Ethereum roadmap with the latest "Strawmap" and stated that while the overall goals of both still overlap, the technical priorities and implementation plans have significantly changed: quantum security, native privacy, protocol simplification, and native Rollups have been elevated, while VDF and numerous EVM incremental improvements have been downgraded. The Strawmap is not a fixed delivery schedule but a continuously modified protocol evolution sketch based on research, engineering capabilities, and community feedback.
Quantum security has become the most obvious priority adjustment direction. Ethereum's current BLS validator signatures, KZG data availability commitments, ECDSA account signatures, and some zero-knowledge proof systems rely on cryptographic assumptions that may be weakened by sufficiently powerful quantum computers in the future. The new roadmap research includes LeanSPHINCS, signature aggregation, zkzk frames, and other post-quantum solutions, aiming to control verification costs, signature sizes, and on-chain data burdens while replacing vulnerable cryptography; the Ethereum Foundation aims to complete core post-quantum infrastructure by around 2029, but this is a research and engineering goal, not a locked protocol commitment.
Privacy has risen from application-level functionality to a protocol-level goal. The new roadmap incorporates directions such as Keyed Nonces, Recent Roots, FOCIL-related designs, Lean Privacy Pool, and Wormholes, aiming to reduce the degree to which accounts, balances, transaction histories, and fund flows are publicly associated while maintaining compliance, resistance to witch attacks, and auditable boundaries. FOCIL is particularly related to anti-censorship: it attempts to reduce the ability of block proposers or builders to selectively exclude specific transactions through protocol rules, and is expected to become an important discussion direction for the Hegotá hard fork.
Scalability logic is also changing. The 2023 roadmap emphasizes carrying as many activities as possible through Rollups, data availability, and EVM improvements; the current Strawmap emphasizes providing dedicated mechanisms for different needs, such as using Blob space to serve Rollup data, using privacy mechanisms for highly sensitive transactions, and using native Rollups to enhance the integration of layer two proofs with mainnet validation. As SNARK and STARK proof systems mature, Ethereum is beginning to explore allowing L1 to directly verify Rollup state transition proofs, rather than treating layer two as a completely independent application protocol.
At the protocol design level, the Verkle Trees route is gradually evolving into a unified Binary Tree, further pointing to PBT; State Expiry has been replaced by new state type designs. Vitalik also proposed that in the long term, LeanISA or RISC-V and other simpler instruction set architectures may replace EVM as the underlying execution environment, keeping EVM as an intermediate representation layer above it. The goal of this direction is not to abolish EVM in the short term, but to reduce client implementation complexity, lower formal verification difficulty, and reserve clearer protocol interfaces for post-quantum cryptography and high-performance proof systems.
In terms of market mechanisms, privacy infrastructure, zero-knowledge proof systems, Rollups, Blob data services, validator clients, and post-quantum cryptography tools will become direct beneficiaries of the new roadmap; service providers relying on public on-chain behavior analysis, address tracking, and existing EVM complex semantics may bear adaptation costs. Users are purchasing lower-cost, more private, and more censorship-resistant settlement capabilities; validators, node operators, and Rollup developers bear the costs of software upgrades, proof verification, data storage, and compatibility. Future funding flows will shift from projects that purely expand TPS to infrastructures that can simultaneously address privacy, security, proof costs, and protocol maintainability.
Source: Public Information
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The 2023 roadmap was formed in the phase after The Merge was completed, when Ethereum's primary task was to further scale the network after switching from proof of work and to allow Rollups to handle most transaction executions. The roadmap's "Surge, Scourge, Verge, Purge, Splurge" correspond to scaling, MEV and staking risks, statelessness, historical data cleanup, and other protocol improvements; its core assumption is that L1 maintains a decentralized settlement layer while L2 handles high-frequency execution. The current Strawmap does not negate this framework but shifts the question from "how to handle more transactions" to "how to handle more transactions under constraints of privacy, quantum security, anti-censorship, and verifiability."
The elevation of quantum security reflects Ethereum's reassessment of the costs of cryptographic migration. Traditional software can hot-fix vulnerabilities after discovery, but public chains must coordinate millions of accounts, dozens of client teams, staking validators, wallets, Rollups, and DeFi protocols to update simultaneously. Once an ECDSA account is used, its public key is exposed on-chain; if future quantum computers have sufficient capability, attackers could theoretically derive private keys from public keys and transfer assets. Therefore, Ethereum's post-quantum work involves not just "changing a signature algorithm" but also account migration, validator signatures, KZG replacements, proof system adaptations, and data compression.
The rise in priority for native privacy also means Ethereum is correcting the consequences of its "default fully transparent" design. Public ledgers facilitate auditing, compliance, and on-chain composability, but for personal salaries, business procurement, institutional transactions, medical payments, voting, charitable donations, and everyday consumption, having address balances and transaction histories fully visible is not ideal. Privacy Pools, Wormholes, and more granular transaction association controls attempt to separate "users can prove legitimacy" from "users must disclose all history"; future competition will not only be between privacy coins and transparent chains but also whether privacy can be embedded in the mainstream smart contract ecosystem.
"Leanification" is the most structural change in this round of the roadmap. EVM, client rules, state structures, historical compatibility, and the accumulation of EIPs have continuously increased the complexity of the Ethereum protocol; the higher the complexity, the more difficult it is for clients to implement independently, the higher the auditing costs, and the greater the risks of vulnerabilities and implementation discrepancies. Vitalik's proposal to use AI-assisted formal verification indicates that Ethereum hopes to shift the protocol from a "complex system maintained by human engineer experience" to a "streamlined system that can be mathematically proven, machine-checked, and cross-validated by multiple clients." AI here is not a consensus participant but an engineering tool to reduce specification writing, code auditing, and formal proof costs.
A historical analogy is the migration of the internet from IPv4 to IPv6, browsers from single kernels to web standards, and operating systems from monolithic kernels to more modular architectures: the difficulty in replacing old systems is not due to their lack of flaws but because compatibility, developer tools, application ecosystems, and user assets have all been built around them. EVM also has a large developer and contract ecosystem, so "EVM exit" is more likely to be a multi-year parallel evolution—using new underlying ISAs to meet future execution and proof needs while protecting existing developers and application assets through IR, compilers, and compatibility layers.
This belongs to industrial chain reconstruction. The future value chain of Ethereum will no longer be just "L1 provides security, L2 provides scaling" but will differentiate into post-quantum signature and account systems, Blob data markets, proof generation and verification, privacy applications, anti-censorship transaction inclusion, native Rollups, and streamlined client implementations. Whoever controls proof costs, privacy entry, data availability, account migration, and protocol verification tools may gain new pricing power in the next phase of Ethereum infrastructure.
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