Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says quantum resistance, privacy, and AI-assisted security have become greater priorities for Ethereum since he published his 2023 roadmap.
In a post on X on Monday, Buterin said he updated his 2023 roadmap to compare its original goals with Ethereum’s current “ Strawmap ”—a working outline of the network’s long-term technical priorities.
“What's most striking, however, is that some completely new things are in the strawmap that are not in this diagram, because they were not in the 2023 roadmap at all,” Buterin wrote. “These reflect changing priorities.”
Among those priorities are stronger privacy and scaling designed for a post-quantum world, alongside efforts to push the “lean-ification of the spec,” or simplify Ethereum’s technical specifications.
“A common theme in scaling, found in both state types and zkzk frames (both new ideas), is that instead of trying to maximally scale all Ethereum activity,” Buterin wrote. “We try to create specialized mechanisms that have more restrictive properties that make them more scaling-friendly, while supporting the heaviest loads incurred by users and applications today (eg. token transfers, swaps) and tomorrow (eg. privacy protocols).”
According to Buterin, advances in AI are making it practical to apply the technique more extensively to Ethereum.