Ethereum's Quantum Future Takes Shape: New Roadmap Priorities
Ethereum's roadmap has undergone significant changes in recent years. A comparison posted by Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, reveals that quantum safety and privacy now sit at the center of Ethereum's long-term strategy.
The 2023 upgrade plan was substantially reshuffled, with quantum defenses and non-EVM execution engines taking precedence over previous priorities such as verifiable delay functions (VDFs) and EVM improvements. The strawmap, a living draft for base-layer upgrades, targets seven network upgrades by 2029, roughly one every six months.
The shift in focus is driven by the need to ensure Ethereum's quantum safety, with leanSPHINCS, a signature scheme resting on hash functions rather than elliptic-curve math, playing a key role. Recursive STARKs proofs and AI-assisted formal verification are now treated as core dependencies for the protocol's future correctness and speed.
The strawmap also assumes Ethereum will eventually expose an instruction set that isn't the EVM, with two leading candidates: leanISA and RISC-V. Buterin suggests the EVM itself could become an intermediate representation sitting on top of this new instruction set, rather than a hard-coded feature of the base protocol.