Ethereum Shakes Up 2023 Roadmap with Quantum Safety and Privacy
Ethereum's roadmap for 2023 has undergone significant changes, with quantum safety and privacy now taking center stage. In a comparison of the original plan against the current draft, Vitalik Buterin revealed that several key areas have been reprioritized or even removed entirely.
According to Buterin, some items on the old plan were reordered, shelved, or swapped for better designs. The most notable additions include quantum safety, privacy protections, and the idea of an execution engine beyond the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
The EVM itself may eventually become an intermediate representation sitting on top of a new instruction set, rather than a hard-coded feature of the base protocol. This is just one of several significant changes made to the roadmap, with quantum safety now taking precedence over verifiable delay functions and cryptographic timers.
Buterin emphasized that Ethereum's long-term goals include becoming quantum-safe, privacy-first, secure, censorship-resistant, and highly performant and scalable, all while staying 'Lean'. The network is expected to achieve these targets by 2029 through a series of upgrades and new technologies.