Compared to the 2023 roadmap, Ethereum has added new directions such as strong privacy, post-quantum scaling, native rollups, blob and gas futures.
Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released an overlay comparison chart of his 2023 technical roadmap and the current Strawmap on August 10. He stated that the overall overlap is high, but some items have had their priorities raised (e.g., quantum security), some lowered (e.g., VDF, multiple EVM improvements), and some solutions replaced by better structures (e.g., Verkle trees first replaced by uniform binary trees, then by PBT; state expiration schemes replaced by new state types).
The current roadmap includes several new directions not mentioned at all in 2023, reflecting priority changes: strong privacy protection is listed as a first-level concern for the first time; aggressive scaling is promoted in a post-quantum context; protocol specifications are streamlined to support formal verification (he says the emergence of AI makes full formal verification of all protocol content possible); block and gas futures concepts are introduced; native rollups are added (previously SNARK technology was not mature enough); and more design space is opened up for "the future of EVM", with the protocol potentially offering non-EVM instruction set architectures to users in the future.
Three Proposals Complement Protocol Capabilities for Private Transfers
Strong privacy protection is the most obvious 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 issue. The keyed nonces, recent roots, streamlined privacy pools, and wormholes mentioned by Vitalik address the concurrency, proof verification, shared anonymity set, and fund association issues of private transactions respectively.
EIP-8250, submitted in April, allows a shared sending address to use multiple sets of independent nonces, preventing a user's pending transactions from blocking other users in the same privacy protocol. EIP-8272, submitted in May, allows private spending proofs to reference recent commitment tree roots without reading the continuously changing application state during verification. EIP-8182 proposes establishing an in-protocol privacy pool for ETH and ERC-20 via system contracts, shared shielded pools, and a split proof architecture. EIP-8250 and EIP-8272 are currently in Draft status, EIP-8182 is in Review, and none of the three have a confirmed activation fork.
Currently, each privacy application maintains its own fund pool; after users and liquidity are fragmented, the anonymity set of a single pool is easily too small. EIP-8182 aims to centralize multiple assets into the same in-protocol anonymity set, and add new verification methods via an extensible authorized verification mechanism to reduce the need to split users again during upgrades.
Wormholes correspond to the zero-knowledge burn proof of EIP-7503: users first transfer ETH to a cryptographically unspendable address, then use zero-knowledge proof to re-mint an equivalent amount of ETH, making it difficult for the public chain to link the original transfer to the new address. This proposal is currently in Stagnant status; the specification and reference implementation still need improvement, and there are risks of implementation errors and double minting. Privacy entering the first-level goals of the roadmap means Ethereum has started to revamp accounts, transaction verification, and base-layer transfers simultaneously, but there are still multiple protocol and wallet tasks to achieve default private accounts.
Quantum Migration Covers Four Cryptographic Areas
Vitalik raised the priority of quantum security and proposed continuing scaling under post-quantum conditions. Risks are distributed across ECDSA signatures used by regular accounts, BLS signatures used by validators, KZG commitments used for Blob data availability, and zero-knowledge proof systems adopted by some rollups and privacy applications. Current quantum computers are not yet sufficient to break these cryptographies, 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 use across the execution layer, consensus layer, and data layer. STARKs mainly rely on hash functions, which can avoid quantum risks of some elliptic curve cryptographies and compress large amounts of computation into easier-to-verify proofs. The Ethereum Foundation has established a dedicated post-quantum team; the current timeline suggests that L1 protocol upgrades may be completed in 2029, and full migration of the execution layer may take several more years with no fixed completion date.
STARKs are also linked to protocol streamlining and formal verification. Vitalik's Extremely Lean Chain concept, proposed in July, envisions compressing a single validator's state to 6 bytes in the first phase and further to 1 byte in the second phase, allowing validators to update balances and rotate public keys daily via 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 Allow L2s to Reuse Mainnet Verification; Timelines Remain Adjustable
EIP-8079, submitted in November 2025, has provided a draft for native rollups. Ethereum opens mainnet state transition functions to the execution layer via an EXECUTE precompile, allowing EVM-equivalent rollups to reuse L1's verification infrastructure. Currently, rollups need to maintain their own proof systems, bridge contracts, and upgrade mechanisms; nativization can reduce custom verification code and provide conditions for removing the security committee. The proof-carrying transactions, ZK verification, and some security designs in EIP-8079 are still marked as to-be-completed and have not been included in confirmed mainnet upgrades.
The Ethereum Foundation further clarified the division of labor between L1 and L2 in March: L2s that want to inherit mainnet security to the greatest extent can shift to native rollups, Stage 2, and synchronous composability; L2s that provide privacy, application-specific efficiency, or other differentiated functions will continue to exist. The native rollup route adjusts the verification relationship between L2s and the mainnet, but does not cancel the multi-chain scaling structure.
State design is also changing: Vitalik said Verkle trees were first replaced by uniform binary trees, then shifted to Partitioned Binary Trees (PBT), and state expiration gave way to new state types. EIP-8347, submitted in July, has proposed offline migration to PBT, but the activation fork and anchor block are still undetermined. Blob and gas futures, non-EVM instruction sets like leanISA or RISC-V have also entered long-term discussions; deeper EVM overhauls are not yet mature enough to be included in the Strawmap.
The Strawmap temporarily outlines seven potential upgrades up to 2029, arranged at a fork rhythm of approximately once every six months. The Ethereum Foundation disclosed in May that core developers believe the year-by-year fork labels after 2026 are too definitive and may be weakened in the future.
Summary
Vitalik's update this time focuses on the changes in Ethereum's technical priorities: privacy, post-quantum security, and formal verification have entered basic protocol design; native rollups and new state types have pushed scaling discussions to verification mechanisms and state structures. Many solutions are still in Draft, Review, or early research stages; the Strawmap provides dependency relationships and long-term directions, and cannot be directly regarded as a launch commitment.
Key questions remain: whether relevant EIPs can enter specific hard forks, whether post-quantum account and validator migration plans can form complete specifications, and whether the proof-carrying transactions and ZK verification designs for native rollups can be finalized. Recent observation milestones are still Glamsterdam in Q4 2026 and Hegotá in 2027, whose proposal scopes are still being determined.