Ethereum Foundation Sets Sights on Quantum Resistance, Privacy, and AI Security

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revealed the Ethereum Foundation's new priorities for the platform. In a recent post, Buterin compared his 2023 roadmap diagram with the strawmap, which outlines five key goals for the base layer of Ethereum. The strawmap aims to achieve seconds-level finality, a throughput of one gigagas per second using zkEVMs, and a teragas layer two that can carry one gigabyte per second through data availability sampling.

The document also prioritizes post-quantum security, which would provide centuries-long cryptographic security via hash-based schemes, replacing elliptic-curve cryptography. Additionally, the strawmap sets privacy as a first-class feature, making it a priority to move privacy from add-on tooling into the protocol. Buterin has been moving in this direction for months and has called this wider program Lean Ethereum.

Buterin notes that some completely new things are in the strawmap that were not in his original 2023 roadmap diagram. The document is maintained by four people, including Buterin, and began as a workshop discussion document in January. It is revised at least quarterly and serves as an invitation to view L1 protocol upgrades through a holistic lens.