Vitalik Buterin puts privacy and quantum resistance front and center in Ethereum’s latest roadmap

Vitalik Buterin's priorities for Ethereum have shifted significantly in recent years, with privacy and quantum security rising as particularly new and intense areas of concern.

On Monday, Buterin posted a comparison of Ethereum’s old roadmap as compared to the Ethereum Foundation’s latest "Strawmap," the reference guide for protocol upgrades through 2029, which was last updated on Aug. 4.

He noted that some tasks were not on the old roadmap at all, referencing a 2023 plan where he outlined Ethereum’s somewhat controversial series of multi-year updates from The Merge, to The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge.

Strong privacy

Most notably, the network is now treating strong privacy as a core requirement. That includes mechanisms meant to better hide user activity and balances, like privacy pools, along with designs that let people move value without exposing their full transaction history, like “wormholes.”

This also includes aspects of FOCIL, or Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, that will be a headliner upgrade for Ethereum’s planned Hegota hardfork.

Quantum-related updates and the so-called “Lean-ification” of Ethereum (ETH) have also taken priority. Lean Ethereum is something of a catchall term for a series of upgrades that could eventually replace or heavily revise nearly every core piece of the protocol, or what Buterin previously called Ethereum’s “third major iteration.”

This includes, in the long term, potentially swapping out the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the software environment that runs all Ethereum apps, with alternative computing formats like RISC-V and leanISA.

Buterin noted that zero-knowledge tools and frameworks also play a greater part in Ethereum’s future. He noted that SNARKs, a type of ZK cryptographic proof, “were nowhere near mature enough” in the past to consider complicated scaling efforts like native rollups. 

Similarly, “modern AI” will “assist in formal verification” of everything on Ethereum. Likewise, blob and gas futures were not ideas that existed in 2023, which are now part of the roadmap.

Making Ethereum lean

Other ideas have been dialed back or swapped out for better approaches, like “many EVM improvements,” Buterin noted. 

“Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users' privacy first. Ethereum will be secure. Ethereum will be censorship-resistant. Ethereum will be highly performant and scalable while satisfying the above. And Ethereum will be Lean,” he said.

Notably, the Strawmap itself is a living draft meant to be revised, rather than a rigid schedule. In the past, the Ethereum Foundation has been criticized for delaying upgrades or for alleged misallocation of resources.

In June, the EF cut 20% of its workforce and reorganized around five core clusters, all of which would be focused on the foundation’s CROPs mandate to advance Ethereum’s censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security goals.

Around the same time, several new organizations were founded to support Ethereum’s development and adoption, including EthLabs, a nonprofit that will contribute R&D work alongside the EF, and EthSystems, a for-profit spun out of the EF’s former Institutional Privacy Task Force that will build institutional-grade privacy tech.