The Brief
- Vitalik Buterin overlaid his 2023 Ethereum roadmap onto the live Strawmap and found the priorities have shifted more than public roadmap talk let on.
- Quantum safety and strong privacy jumped up the list while Verifiable Delay Functions and many old EVM upgrades got cut.
- Buterin floated retiring the EVM itself as the layer developers touch, in favor of a leaner instruction set like leanISA or RISC-V.
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, overlaid his 2023 roadmap diagram onto the network’s current development plan, the Strawmap, in a post on Monday, and the comparison shows how far Ethereum’s priorities have moved since he first drew it.
Quantum safety climbs the queue as VDFs and old EVM plans get cut
Buterin wrote that the two roadmaps still share “a lot of overlap,” but flagged real change underneath. Quantum safety moved up the queue. Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) and what he called “many EVM improvements” got cut entirely.
The Verkle tree plan gave way to a unified binary tree, then to a further design he calls PBT. A handful of ideas absent from the 2023 diagram now sit in the plan.
I updated my 2023 roadmap diagram to overlay where the items that were there sit in the current Strawmap ( https://t.co/9deLIQWG24 ).
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 10, 2026
In general, a lot of overlap, but:
* Some things got reshuffled in order (eg. quantum safety up-prioritized)
* Some things deprioritized (eg.… pic.twitter.com/XLdIt4kAgT
Items nowhere in the 2023 plan now anchor the roadmap
The newest cluster centers on privacy: keyed nonces and recent roots, parts of FOCIL, and a lean privacy pool built around a mechanism Buterin calls wormholes, additions that did not exist in the earlier plan at all.
A second cluster pairs post-quantum cryptography with aggressive scaling: leanSPHINCS signatures and aggregation, alongside what Buterin termed zkzk frames, detailed in an Ethereum Magicians proposal for a frame type combining post-quantum signatures with STARK aggregation.
The clearest break from 2023 sits inside that zkzk frames aside. Buterin wrote the construction already implies exposing users to an instruction set that is not the EVM, Ethereum’s virtual machine, with leanISA and RISC-V the leading candidates.
He raised turning the EVM itself into an intermediate layer atop that instruction set, rather than a base-protocol feature, an idea he called too early even for the Strawmap. Three years ago SNARKs were not mature enough to support native rollups, let alone an EVM successor.
New state types are not a rebrand of the old state-expiry plan, Buterin wrote. He called them a different way to scale: narrower mechanisms built for today’s heaviest loads, like token transfers and swaps, and tomorrow’s, like privacy protocols.
Buterin also leans hard on AI-assisted formal verification. One primitive that aggregates proofs to verify dependencies is expected to run in three places: the execution, consensus and data layers, reuse he called “only safe with formal verification,” itself “only feasible with modern AI tools.”
None of this carries an EIP number yet. The Strawmap is Buterin’s own synthesis of work by, in his words, dozens of Ethereum researchers and developers, still short of a ratified client specification.
Two questions remain open: which instruction set, leanISA or RISC-V, ultimately wins, and how soon the zkzk frame proposal advances past discussion on Ethereum Magicians. Coordination between client teams and the Ethereum Foundation will decide which ideas graduate next.
The reordering lands as institutional demand for Ethereum exposure keeps building, handing privacy and quantum-safety work a far more immediate audience than a research roadmap would have had in 2023.
Buterin closed the post with guarantees, not a timeline: “Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users’ privacy first. Ethereum will be secure. Ethereum will be censorship-resistant. Ethereum will be highly performant and scalable while satisfying the above. And Ethereum will be Lean.“
