Ethereum’s Next Era: Vitalik Buterin Targets Quantum Safety, AI, and First-Class Privacy With New Roadmap

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has presented a major update to the network’s technological direction, radically changing its development priorities. The “Strawmap” he published eliminates the old six-phase roadmap — including the Merge, the Surge and others — and divides the blockchain’s evolution into three architectural layers: consensus (CL), data (DL) and execution (EL).

The main marker of the new strategy is Ethereum’s official shift toward protection against future quantum computers, comprehensive user privacy and the integration of AI tools for code verification, while abandoning several older technological ideas.

“Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users’ privacy first. Ethereum will be secure. Ethereum will be censorship-resistant. Ethereum will be highly performant and scalable while satisfying the above. And Ethereum will be Lean.” — Vitalik Buterin

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What prompted the overhaul of the old Ethereum roadmap

Expectations that powerful quantum computers could emerge soon have forced researchers to rewrite the security roadmap with the introduction of a post-quantum public-key registry and PQ transactions. 

Buterin emphasized that the roadmap now includes “aggressive scaling in the context of post-quantum,” involving lightweight LeanSPHINCS signatures and “zkzk” cryptographic frameworks.

To achieve this, developers have made difficult trade-offs: Verkle trees, which had been under development for years, have officially been declared obsolete. According to Buterin, some elements were “replaced with superior constructions.” 

In this case, Verkle trees gave way to Poseidon binary trees (PBTs), originally designed to work efficiently with the complex mathematics of STARK proofs.

Buterin acknowledged that previous roadmaps critically lacked built-in privacy tools and that the network now requires “first-class attention to strong privacy.” Keyed nonces, elements of FOCIL, lean privacy pools and a “wormhole” architecture are being integrated into the protocol to make it possible to conduct fully shielded transfers directly at the network’s base layer.

Why Ethereum’s economics are changing and what exactly AI will control

Instead of attempting to “maximally scale ALL Ethereum activity,” developers are creating specialized mechanisms that have more restrictive properties. They are intended to support “the heaviest loads incurred by users and applications today and tomorrow,” including token transfers, fast swaps and privacy protocols. 

The technical foundation of this approach will consist of recursive STARK proofs and native rollups, which could not even have been considered in 2023 because “SNARKs were nowhere near mature enough.”

At the same time, Ethereum’s economics are being reformed. Short- and long-term futures for gas and blobs have been added to the roadmap, with Buterin separately noting that this idea simply did not exist back in 2023. 

This will allow major applications to purchase network capacity in advance at a fixed price, protecting users from sudden fee spikes.

The security of such a densely integrated architecture will be possible only through end-to-end formal verification (FV) of protocol specifications. Buterin plans to entrust this task entirely to modern AI tools, as the volume of code has already become too large for humans to verify on their own.