Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s updated “Strawmap” places protocol-level privacy and post-quantum security alongside scaling and simplification as leading long-term priorities for Ethereum, marking a shift from the network’s 2023 roadmap toward deeper changes in how users transact, how state is stored, and how the chain prepares for future cryptographic risks.
Published on Aug. 10 as a comparison between the 2023 roadmap and the current overlay, the chart retains many established Ethereum goals while moving several proposed technologies into new positions. Privacy on Ethereum’s base layer, migration planning for cryptography resistant to quantum attacks, native rollups, and formal-verification-oriented simplification all receive more explicit attention.
The document is a dependency and direction map rather than a schedule of confirmed upgrades. Many of the proposals it references remain in Draft, Review, stagnant, or research stages, with no assigned activation fork.
Privacy moves onto the base-layer agenda
The Strawmap lists “strong privacy” on Layer 1 as a distinct workstream, reflecting an effort to provide privacy-building tools through Ethereum’s protocol rather than leaving the function entirely to applications and separate networks.
Three Ethereum Improvement Proposals outline parts of that architecture: EIP-8250, EIP-8272, and EIP-8182. None has a scheduled mainnet activation.
EIP-8250, submitted in April and currently in Draft, would introduce multiple independent nonces for users operating through a shared sender address. A nonce is a transaction counter that prevents transactions from being replayed. Under existing account designs, one pending transaction can delay later transactions using the same address. The proposed change would allow separate users or workflows within a privacy system to proceed independently.
EIP-8272, submitted in May and also in Draft, addresses a different obstacle: verification against rapidly changing blockchain state. It would allow proofs for private spending to reference recent roots of a commitment tree. That approach could let a privacy protocol verify whether funds are eligible to be spent without repeatedly reading application state that may have changed since a transaction was created.
EIP-8182, now in Review, proposes a protocol-level privacy pool for ETH and ERC-20 tokens. Its design includes system contracts, a shared shielded pool, and a separation between the pool’s assets and its proof-generation architecture.
The shared-pool model is aimed at a practical privacy limitation. Existing privacy applications often operate independent pools, dividing users and liquidity across separate systems. That fragmentation can reduce the anonymity set, the group of potential senders or recipients among whom a transaction can blend.
The roadmap also references “wormholes” associated with EIP-7503. That proposal describes a zero-knowledge burn-and-mint mechanism: ETH would be sent to a cryptographically unspendable address, and an equivalent amount could then be minted under a separate arrangement supported by a proof. EIP-7503 is marked Stagnant, with incomplete specifications and reference implementations among the remaining work. The proposal also identifies implementation mistakes and duplicate minting as risks requiring resolution.
Quantum migration receives a clearer timeline
Buterin’s updated roadmap gives greater prominence to post-quantum migration, the long-term process of replacing cryptographic systems that a sufficiently capable quantum computer could break.
The Strawmap identifies exposure across four major components of Ethereum’s design: ECDSA signatures used by typical accounts, BLS signatures used by validators, KZG commitments used for blob data availability, and some zero-knowledge systems used by rollups and privacy applications.
Current quantum computers cannot break these cryptographic systems, according to the roadmap. The concern is the length and complexity of replacing them across a live global network once the threat becomes more immediate. Account migration, validator changes, wallet support, proving systems, and application-level upgrades would not occur simultaneously.
The document lists directions including leanSPHINCS signature aggregation, “zkzk frames,” and recursive STARK proofs across execution, consensus, and data layers. STARKs are zero-knowledge proofs built around hash functions, reducing dependence on the elliptic-curve cryptography used in several existing Ethereum components.
The Ethereum Foundation has formed a dedicated post-quantum team, according to the roadmap. It gives 2029 as a possible timing reference for a Layer 1 protocol upgrade, while warning that a full execution-layer migration would take additional years and has no fixed completion date.
Leaner protocol design connects several projects
The Strawmap links quantum-resistant proofs to Buterin’s “Extremely Lean Chain” concept, which seeks to reduce protocol complexity and make Ethereum easier to formally verify. Formal verification uses machine-checkable mathematical proofs to show that software follows specified rules, an approach that could reduce the risk of subtle consensus or implementation errors.
One ambitious target in that design would reduce validator state to six bytes in an initial phase and one byte in a later phase. Validators would update balances and rotate daily public keys through zero-knowledge proofs rather than maintaining larger amounts of directly stored state.
The roadmap’s reference to artificial intelligence is narrow. AI would help researchers write and check machine-verifiable mathematical proofs, rather than produce blocks, vote on network rules, or make consensus decisions.
Ethereum’s state roadmap has also changed since 2023. Earlier plans centered on Verkle trees, a data structure designed to make blockchain state easier to verify. The Strawmap instead points first toward a unified binary tree and later toward a partitioned binary tree, or PBT.
EIP-8347, submitted in July, proposes an offline migration to PBT. Its text does not define an activation fork or anchor block, leaving the proposal at an early planning stage. The updated roadmap also replaces the previous “state expiry” framing with work on new state types.
Native rollups remain an early proposal
The scaling section introduces “native rollups,” a concept that would bring more rollup verification into Ethereum’s protocol design. EIP-8079, a draft dated November 2025, proposes an EXECUTE precompile that would expose Ethereum mainnet’s state-transition function to the execution layer.
That could allow EVM-equivalent rollups to reuse Layer 1 verification infrastructure, reducing the amount of custom external code needed to establish whether a rollup block follows Ethereum’s execution rules. The proposal remains incomplete: proof-carrying transactions, zero-knowledge verification, and elements of its safety design are still unfinished.
The Strawmap sketches seven potential upgrades through 2029 on an approximate one-upgrade-per-half-year cadence. A May disclosure referenced in the document said core developers considered year-by-year fork labels beyond 2026 too rigid, suggesting later versions may present less fixed scheduling.
Near-term attention is directed toward Glamsterdam in the fourth quarter of 2026 and Hegotá in 2027, whose proposal scope remains under development. The roadmap’s strongest message is less about any imminent fork than about Ethereum’s expanding technical burden: it is now attempting to improve privacy, scale rollups, contain state growth, simplify the protocol, and prepare for cryptographic replacement within a single long-horizon architecture.
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