Ethereum’s Priorities Have Changed a Lot Since 2023, Vitalik Says, Comparing New Roadmap

Vitalik Buterin has redrawn his 2023 Ethereum roadmap on top of the Ethereum Foundation’s current Strawmap, and what stands out is not what survived but what was never there. Much of the old diagram still maps over, the Ethereum co-founder wrote on Monday, but “some completely new things are in the strawmap that are NOT in this diagram, because they were not in the 2023 roadmap at all.”

Top of that list is privacy. Buterin wrote in the post that the Strawmap gives “First-class attention to strong privacy,” covering keyed nonces and recent roots, parts of Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, or FOCIL, privacy pools and wormholes, a wider version of the plan he set out earlier this year.

Quantum safety has been pushed up the queue, paired with scaling work built for a post-quantum world: leanSPHINCS signatures and aggregation, plus zkzk frames. Blob and gas futures, native rollups and a “Lean-ification of the spec” to make formal verification tractable are also new.

Other items went the other way. Verifiable delay functions and many EVM improvements were deprioritized, and two old workhorses were swapped for stronger designs: Verkle trees gave way to a unified binary tree and then PBT, while state expiry was replaced by new state types.

Two themes tie the additions together. On scaling, instead of “trying to maximally scale ALL ethereum activity,” the aim is to “create specialized mechanisms that have more restrictive properties that make them more scaling-friendly” while still carrying today’s heaviest loads, from swaps and token transfers to privacy protocols later.

The second is a bet that recursive STARKs and AI-accelerated formal verification are safe to build on. One aggregation primitive is expected to appear in three layers of the protocol at once: execution, consensus and data. “This can only be safe with formal verification, which is itself only feasible with modern AI tools,” Buterin wrote in the post.

The Strawmap sketches roughly one fork every six months through 2029 and debuted in February.

“Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users’ privacy first,” Buterin wrote in his Monday post. “And Ethereum will be Lean.”

Related Listen: Zcash, Ethereum, Aztec, Canton and More: Which Chain Will Win the Privacy Race?

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