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 that he has updated the 2023 Ethereum roadmap and compared the technical directions in the previous roadmap with the current "Strawmap" plan. Vitalik stated that the two overlap significantly overall, but some technical priorities and implementation paths have changed.

Vitalik said some directions have been reordered—for example, the importance of quantum security technology has been further elevated; the priority of certain projects has been downgraded, including VDF (verifiable delay functions) and some EVM improvement proposals; other technical routes have been replaced by more advanced solutions, such as the evolution of Verkle Tree into a unified BT (Binary Tree), while state expiry has shifted toward a new state type design.

Vitalik noted that the most obvious 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, with related directions including keyed nonces, recent roots, parts of the FOCIL design, lean privacy pools, and wormholes;

Post-quantum scalability solutions: including technologies such as LeanSPHINCS signatures, signature aggregation, and zkzk frames;

Streamlined protocol specifications and formal verification: Vitalik believes that, with modern AI tools, formally verifying the entire Ethereum protocol is becoming feasible;

Blob and Gas futures mechanisms: this direction had not yet emerged 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 (ISA), such as LeanISA and RISC-V, and explore making the EVM an intermediate representation (IR) on top of them.

Vitalik stated that Ethereum's future scaling approach is changing: rather than infinitely expanding the entire network to support all types of activity, Ethereum will increasingly adopt specialized mechanisms—designing more efficient structures for 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 technological development. He said recursive STARKs will play a role at multiple layers of the protocol, and large-scale adoption of these complex cryptographic structures will require formal verification to ensure security.

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