Vitalik Buterin’s latest comparison of Ethereum’s development plans shows the network’s priorities expanding well beyond scaling throughput. A roadmap that once focused on completing the post-Merge upgrade sequence now gives far greater weight to privacy, quantum resistance, censorship resistance and long-term changes to Ethereum’s core execution environment.
Buterin published the comparison on Monday, setting Ethereum’s 2023 roadmap beside the Ethereum Foundation’s updated “Strawmap,” a living protocol-upgrade reference guide that extends through 2029 and was last revised on Aug. 4. The document remains a draft rather than a binding delivery schedule, but it offers a clearer view of the technical problems Ethereum developers expect to address after the network’s major scaling upgrades.
The contrast is substantial. Ethereum’s 2023 plan was organized around six stages: the Merge, the Surge, the Scourge, the Verge, the Purge and the Splurge. The updated Strawmap retains links to those themes but introduces priorities that were not part of the earlier framework, including native rollups, gas futures, quantum security and stronger transaction privacy.
Privacy moves closer to the protocol’s baseline
The Strawmap describes strong privacy as a baseline property Ethereum should pursue, rather than a feature limited to specialized applications or separate privacy-focused networks. That direction would seek to reduce the public exposure of user balances, payment histories and onchain activity while preserving Ethereum’s ability to verify transactions.
The roadmap refers to privacy pools and “wormholes” as potential tools in that work. Privacy pools are designed to let users prove that funds come from an acceptable source without publicly exposing a complete transaction trail. Wormholes, as described in the roadmap context, would provide methods for moving value while revealing less of its history.
Ethereum’s transparent ledger has made it possible to audit token movements and smart-contract activity in real time, but that same visibility can expose sensitive financial information. Greater protocol-level privacy could be particularly relevant for organizations that need to manage payments, payrolls, trading activity or treasury operations without publishing every transaction detail to competitors and outside observers.
The Ethereum Foundation’s organizational moves also point toward privacy becoming a more defined development area. In June, the foundation reduced its workforce by 20% and reorganized into five operational clusters aligned with its CROPs mandate: censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security.
The broader ecosystem is also adding dedicated groups. EthLabs was referenced as a nonprofit intended to contribute research and development alongside the Ethereum Foundation. EthSystems, a for-profit entity formed from the foundation’s former Institutional Privacy Task Force, is focused on developing privacy technology aimed at institutional use cases.
Censorship resistance enters the hardfork agenda
The Strawmap gives more attention to FOCIL, or fork-choice enforced inclusion lists, a proposed censorship-resistance mechanism associated with the planned Hegota hardfork.
In broad terms, inclusion lists would require Ethereum’s block-production process to account for valid transactions that might otherwise be excluded by block builders or validators. The “fork-choice” element refers to the rules Ethereum nodes use to determine which version of the blockchain they recognize as canonical.
The proposal addresses a growing concern around the concentration of block-building infrastructure. Ethereum’s proof-of-stake design separates several functions involved in producing blocks, including proposing and building them. That structure can improve efficiency, but it also creates points where transactions could be delayed or filtered.
FOCIL remains a design direction rather than a completed feature. Its presence in the Strawmap nevertheless places censorship resistance alongside scaling and security as an explicit protocol objective, rather than treating it solely as a social or application-layer concern.
Quantum risks and a leaner protocol design
Buterin also highlighted quantum security and “lean-ification” among the newer roadmap themes. Quantum computing is not currently capable of breaking Ethereum’s cryptography at the scale required to threaten the network, but the roadmap treats preparation as a long-term engineering task rather than an emergency response.
A sufficiently capable quantum computer could undermine cryptographic assumptions used across many digital systems. Ethereum’s planning therefore includes evaluating ways to migrate toward quantum-resistant cryptography before such hardware becomes a practical threat.
Lean-ification refers to efforts to simplify, replace or more formally define major protocol components. The goal is to make Ethereum easier to secure, maintain and verify over many years of upgrades. Buterin’s comparison suggests this work could involve substantial revisions to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the software environment that executes smart contracts.
Possible alternatives named in the roadmap include RISC-V and leanISA. RISC-V is an open instruction-set architecture used in computer hardware and software design, while leanISA refers to a more minimal execution specification. Any move away from, or major redesign of, the EVM would be technically complex and would require careful consideration of compatibility with Ethereum’s existing smart-contract ecosystem.
The roadmap also reduces emphasis on “many EVM improvements,” according to Buterin, suggesting that developers may prefer fewer incremental changes if a more coherent long-term execution strategy emerges.
Zero-knowledge proofs gain a broader role
Zero-knowledge technology occupies a larger place in the updated framework. The Strawmap includes SNARK-based proofs and related systems, which allow one party to demonstrate that a statement is valid without revealing the underlying information.
Ethereum has already used zero-knowledge proofs in several scaling designs, particularly rollups that process transactions away from the main chain and submit cryptographic proofs back to Ethereum. The newer roadmap places the technology in a wider set of possible uses, including privacy and verification.
Buterin also referenced modern artificial intelligence as a possible aid for formal verification. Formal verification uses mathematical methods to test whether software behaves according to a precise specification. Applied carefully, such tools could help developers identify errors in increasingly complex protocol code, though AI-assisted verification does not remove the need for human review and rigorous security testing.
The appearance of blob futures and gas futures in the Strawmap adds another layer to Ethereum’s market-design work. Blobs are data containers introduced to support rollup activity more efficiently. Futures tied to blob capacity or gas costs could eventually give users and applications tools to plan for future network fees, though the roadmap does not present these concepts as immediate products.
Ethereum’s updated plan therefore points toward a longer and more technically demanding phase of development. Scaling remains part of the agenda through native rollups and data improvements, but the network’s reference guide now gives equal attention to whether transactions can remain private, reach the chain without censorship, withstand future cryptographic risks and run on an execution layer designed for decades of maintenance.
Learn how Ethereum’s evolving roadmap impacts traders in 2025 in this detailed guide on key upgrades.
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