Vitalik updates Ethereum roadmap: quantum security, privacy protection, and AI-assisted formal verification become new priorities

Odaily News: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on X, stating that he has updated the 2023 Ethereum roadmap and compared the technical directions in the previous roadmap with the current "Strawmap" plan. Vitalik noted that the two overlap significantly overall, but some technical priorities and implementation paths have changed.

Vitalik stated that some directions have been reordered—for example, the importance of quantum security technology has been further elevated. Some projects have been deprioritized, including VDFs (verifiable delay functions) and certain EVM improvement proposals. Other technical routes have been replaced by more advanced solutions, such as Verkle Trees evolving into a unified Binary Tree (BT), while state expiry has shifted toward a new state type design.

Vitalik pointed out that the most noticeable change in the current roadmap is the addition of new directions that did not exist in the 2023 roadmap, reflecting a shift in Ethereum's future development priorities, including:

Enhanced privacy protection: Ethereum will place greater emphasis on native privacy capabilities. Relevant directions include keyed nonces, recent roots, parts of the FOCIL design, lean privacy pools, and wormholes.

Scalability solutions for the post-quantum era: including technologies such as LeanSPHINCS signatures, signature aggregation, and zkzk frames.

Streamlined protocol specifications to drive formal verification: Vitalik believes that with the help of modern AI tools, formally verifying the entire Ethereum protocol is becoming feasible.

Blob and gas futures mechanisms: This direction did not exist when the 2023 roadmap was formulated.

Native Rollup support: As zero-knowledge proof technology matures, Ethereum is beginning to explore deeper Rollup integration.

Redesigning the future EVM architecture: Ethereum may introduce simpler, more efficient new instruction set architectures (ISAs)—such as LeanISA and RISC-V—and explore making the EVM an intermediate representation (IR) on top of them.

Vitalik stated that the future approach to Ethereum scaling is changing: rather than indefinitely expanding the entire network to accommodate all types of activity, Ethereum will increasingly adopt specialized mechanisms, designing more efficient structures tailored to specific use cases to meet current and future high-load demands—such as token transfers, transactions, and privacy protocols.

Additionally, Vitalik emphasized that STARK proof technology and AI-assisted formal verification will become the core foundation of Ethereum's technical development. He noted that recursive STARKs will play a role across multiple protocol layers, and that scaling these complex cryptographic structures will require formal verification to ensure security.

Vitalik concluded that Ethereum will continue to evolve toward being "quantum-secure, privacy-first, safe and reliable, censorship-resistant, high-performance, and scalable," ultimately becoming a leaner protocol system.