Privacy, Quantum Security, Native Rollups – What's New in Ethereum's Roadmap?

Original author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

On August 10, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an overlay comparison of his 2023 technical roadmap with the current Strawmap. He noted that overall alignment is high, but certain items have been prioritized higher (such as quantum security), some have been deprioritized (such as VDF and several EVM improvements), and some approaches have been replaced by better constructions (such as Verkle trees first being replaced by unified binary trees, then by PBT, and state expiration schemes being replaced by new state types).

The current roadmap introduces multiple entirely new directions not covered at all in 2023, reflecting shifting priorities, including strong privacy protection being listed as a top-tier concern for the first time; advancing aggressive scalability in a post-quantum context; streamlining protocol specifications to assist auxiliary formal verification — he stated that the emergence of AI has made complete formal verification of all protocol content feasible; introducing the concept of blocks and gas futures; introducing native rollups (previously, SNARK technology was not mature enough); and opening up more design space for "the future of the EVM," with the protocol potentially offering non-EVM instruction set architectures to users in the future.

Three Proposals Fill Protocol-Level Gaps for Private Transfers

Strong privacy protection is the most noticeable change. The 2023 roadmap did not cover this set of protocol-level designs, but the current Strawmap has elevated privacy L1 to a protocol-level topic. The keyed nonces, recent roots, streamlined privacy pools, and wormholes named by Vitalik respectively address the issues of concurrency in private transactions, proof verification, shared anonymity sets, and fund correlation.

EIP-8250, submitted in April, allows a shared sending address to use multiple independent nonces, preventing one user's pending transactions from blocking other users within the same privacy protocol. EIP-8272, submitted in May, allows private spending proofs to reference recent commitment tree roots without needing to read continuously changing application state during verification. EIP-8182 proposes establishing an in-protocol privacy pool for ETH and ERC-20 through system contracts, shared shielded pools, and a separated proof architecture. EIP-8250 and EIP-8272 are currently in Draft status, while EIP-8182 is in Review; none have a confirmed activation fork.

Currently, each privacy application maintains its own fund pool. When users and liquidity are fragmented, the anonymity set of a single pool can easily become too small. EIP-8182 aims to consolidate multiple asset types into the same in-protocol anonymity set and add new verification methods through an extensible authorization verification mechanism, reducing the need to re-split users during upgrades.

Wormholes correspond to the zero-knowledge burn proof in EIP-7503, where users first transfer ETH to cryptographically unspendable addresses and then use zero-knowledge proofs to re-mint an equivalent amount of ETH, making it difficult for the public chain to link original transfers to new addresses. This proposal is currently in Stagnant status, with specifications and reference implementations still needing refinement, alongside risks of implementation errors and double minting. Privacy entering the roadmap's top-tier goals means Ethereum has begun simultaneously overhauling accounts, transaction verification, and base-layer transfers — though significant protocol and wallet work remains before default private accounts become a reality.

Quantum Migration Covers Four Areas of Cryptography

Vitalik has elevated quantum security in priority and proposed continuing scalability efforts under post-quantum conditions. The risk distribution covers the ECDSA signatures used by regular accounts, the BLS signatures used by validators, the KZG commitments used for blob data availability, and the zero-knowledge proof systems adopted by some rollups and privacy applications. Current quantum computers are not yet capable of breaking these cryptographic schemes, but replacing account and validator keys across the global network requires years of preparation.

The latest roadmap lists directions such as leanSPHINCS signature aggregation and zkzk frames, and places recursive STARKs for joint use across the execution layer, consensus layer, and data layer. STARKs primarily rely on hash functions, which can avoid some of the quantum risks associated with elliptic curve cryptography, and can also compress large amounts of computation into more easily verifiable proofs. The Ethereum Foundation has already established a dedicated post-quantum team. The current timeline communicated is that L1 protocol upgrades could be completed by 2029, with full execution-layer migration potentially taking several more years and having no fixed completion date.

STARKs are also connected to protocol simplification and formal verification. Vitalik's Extremely Lean Chain proposal from July compresses a single validator's state to 6 bytes in the first phase, further reducing it to 1 byte in the second phase, while allowing validators to update balances and rotate public keys daily through zero-knowledge proofs. Vitalik believes modern AI tools make full-protocol formal verification feasible. Here, AI is used to write and check machine-verifiable mathematical proofs, and does not participate in block production, voting, or consensus decisions.

Native Rollups Let L2 Reuse Mainnet Verification, Timelines Will Still Adjust

EIP-8079, submitted in November 2025, has already provided a draft for native rollups. Ethereum would expose the mainnet state transition function to the execution layer through an EXECUTE precompile, allowing EVM-equivalent rollups to reuse L1's verification infrastructure. Rollups currently need to maintain their own proof systems, bridge contracts, and upgrade mechanisms. Native rollups can reduce custom verification code and create conditions for removing security councils. In EIP-8079, the proof-carrying transactions, ZK verification, and some security designs are still marked as pending, and the proposal has not been included in any confirmed mainnet upgrade.

In March, the Ethereum Foundation provided further clarification on the division of labor between L1 and L2, suggesting that L2s seeking maximum inheritance of mainnet security can transition to native rollups, Stage 2, and synchronous composability; L2s providing privacy, application-specific efficiency, or other differentiated functionality will continue to exist. The native rollup path adjusts the verification relationship between L2 and the mainnet without canceling the multi-chain scaling structure.

State design is also changing. Vitalik noted that Verkle trees were first replaced by unified binary trees, then shifted to partitioned binary trees (PBT), while state expiration has given way to new state types. EIP-8347, submitted in July, has proposed offline migration to PBT, but the activation fork and anchor block remain undetermined. Blob and gas futures, leanISA or RISC-V and other non-EVM instruction sets have also entered long-term discussions, though deeper EVM modifications are not yet mature enough to be written into the Strawmap.

The Strawmap currently sketches seven potential upgrades through 2029, arranged at a cadence of roughly one fork every six months. In May, the Ethereum Foundation disclosed that core developers already believe the per-fork year labels after 2026 are overly deterministic and may be de-emphasized in the future.

Summary

Vitalik's latest update highlights shifts in Ethereum's technical priorities. Privacy, post-quantum security, and formal verification have entered base protocol design, while native rollups and new state types advance the scalability discussion into verification mechanisms and state structures. Many proposals remain in Draft, Review, or early research stages. The Strawmap provides dependency relationships and long-term directions and should not be directly interpreted as launch commitments.

Key questions remain: whether the relevant EIPs will enter specific hard forks, whether post-quantum account and validator migration schemes can form complete specifications, and whether native rollups' proof-carrying transactions and ZK verification designs can be completed. Near-term observation points remain Glamsterdam in Q4 2026, as well as Hegotá in 2027, whose proposal scope is still being determined.