Ethereum Shifts Focus to Quantum Safety and Privacy in 2023 Roadmap

Ethereum's roadmap has undergone significant changes, with a shift in focus towards quantum safety and privacy. According to Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the network's current priorities are different from what was initially planned three years ago.

The original plan for 2023 had verifiable delay functions (VDFs) and many EVM improvements as top priorities, but these have been deprioritized in favor of newer constructions. Quantum safety has become a major focus area, with the introduction of mechanisms designed to obscure who is transacting with whom.

The strawmap upgrade schedule, which outlines seven network upgrades through 2029, assumes that Ethereum will be quantum-safe and privacy-first by then. The document also mentions transaction finality within seconds, 10,000 transactions per second on the base layer using zero-knowledge proofs of the EVM, and layer-2 networks reaching as high as 10 million transactions per second.

The strawmap relies heavily on STARKs, a family of cryptographic proofs that let one computer verify another's work without redoing it. Recursive STARKs are expected to show up across three separate layers of the protocol at once: execution, consensus, and data storage. AI-accelerated formal verification is also seen as crucial for the protocol's future correctness and speed.