Vitalik updates Ethereum roadmap: quantum security, privacy protection, and AI-assisted formal verification become new priorities

According to Twitter, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted an article on the X platform that he has updated the 2023 Ethereum roadmap and compared the technical direction in the previous roadmap with the current “Strawmap” plan. Vitalik said there is a large overlap between the two as a whole, but some technology priorities and implementation paths have changed.

Vitalik said that some directions have been reordered, such as the importance of quantum safety technology being further enhanced; some project priorities have been reduced, including VDF (verifiable delay function) and some EVM improvement solutions; other technical routes have been replaced by more advanced solutions, such as Verkle Tree evolving into a unified BT (Binary Tree), and state expiration (state expiry) is shifting to a new state type design.

Vitalik pointed out that the most obvious change in the current roadmap is the addition of some new directions not yet present in the 2023 roadmap, reflecting a shift in focus on the future development of Ethereum, including:

Strengthen privacy protection: Ethereum will pay more attention to native privacy capabilities. Related directions include keyed random numbers (keyed nonces), recent state roots (recent roots), FOCIL partial design, lightweight privacy pools (lean privacy pools), and wormholes;

Scaling solutions for the post-quantum era: including technologies such as LeanSphinCS signatures, signature aggregation, and zkzk frames;

Streamline protocol specifications and promote formal verification: Vitalik believes that it is now possible to formally verify the entire Ethereum protocol using modern AI tools;

Blob and Gas futures mechanism: this direction was not emerging when the 2023 roadmap was drawn up;

Native Rollup support: As zero-knowledge proof technology matured, Ethereum began exploring deeper Rollup integrations;

Redesigning the EVM architecture of the future: In the future, Ethereum may introduce new, simpler and more efficient instruction sets (ISAs), such as LeanISA and RISC-V, and explore making EVM an intermediate representation (IR) on top of it.

Vitalik said that future Ethereum expansion ideas are changing: rather than allowing the entire network to expand all types of activities indefinitely, Ethereum will use more specialized mechanisms to meet current and future high-load requirements by designing more efficient structures for specific scenarios, such as token transfers, transactions, and privacy agreements.

Furthermore, Vitalik emphasized that STARK proof technology and AI-assisted formal verification will be the core foundation for the development of Ethereum technology. He said that recursive STARK will play a role at multiple levels of the protocol, and large-scale application of these complex cryptographic structures requires formal verification to ensure security.

Vitalik concluded that in the future, Ethereum will continue to develop in the direction of “quantum security, privacy first, security and reliability, censorship resistance, high performance, and scalability”, and eventually become a leaner (lean) protocol system.