Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Aug. 10 published an update to his 2023 roadmap and compared it with the current "Strawmap," saying the two broadly overlap but now differ in technical priorities and design choices.
According to Buterin, some areas have been reordered. Quantum security has gained importance, while VDFs, or verifiable delay functions, and many EVM improvement proposals have moved lower on the priority list.
Older proposals have been replaced in several areas
Buterin said some earlier approaches have also given way to newer designs. Verkle trees, for example, have evolved into a unified BT, or Binary Tree, and then to PBT, or Protobuf Binary Tree. State expiry has also shifted toward a new state-type design.
He described the most visible change as the presence of many directions in the current Strawmap that were not part of the 2023 roadmap, a sign that Ethereum's development focus has changed.
Privacy, post-quantum scaling and protocol simplification are now central topics
One of those newer focus areas is stronger privacy capability. Buterin said Ethereum is placing more weight on native privacy support, including Keyed Nonces, Recent Roots, FOCIL-related designs, Lean Privacy Pool and Wormholes.
He also highlighted post-quantum scaling approaches, including LeanSPHINCS signatures, signature aggregation and zkzk frames, as part of an effort to deliver high-performance expansion in a quantum-secure environment.
Another direction is protocol "leanification." Buterin said simplifying protocol design can help make formal verification possible. He added that modern AI tools are what make formal verification of the full protocol feasible.
Blob and Gas futures mechanisms are also part of the newer agenda. He said that area did not appear in the 2023 roadmap and has now become an important line of exploration for Ethereum's economic model.
Native rollups and a possible post-EVM architecture are under discussion
On scaling architecture, native rollups have emerged as a key theme. Buterin said that as SNARK technology matures, Ethereum is beginning to consider integrating rollup functionality more deeply into the protocol layer.
He also raised the question of what comes after the EVM. In his view, Ethereum may not remain limited to the EVM in the future and could adopt a simpler, more efficient instruction set architecture such as LeanISA or RISC-V, while keeping the EVM as an intermediate representation layer.
Ethereum's scaling strategy is shifting toward specialized mechanisms
Buterin said Ethereum's scaling direction is changing. Rather than trying to maximize support for every type of activity through a single approach, the network is leaning toward specialized mechanisms for different use cases. The goal, he said, is to improve overall efficiency while meeting high-load demand for token transfers, transactions and future privacy-focused applications.
He said Ethereum's security base will be built around technologies such as STARK proofs and AI-assisted formal verification, while work continues on quantum security, user privacy, censorship resistance and high-performance scalability.
Buterin summed up the direction this way: "Ethereum will become quantum-secure, will prioritize user privacy, will remain secure and censorship-resistant, and will achieve high performance and scalability while meeting those goals."