Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revisited his 2023 Ethereum roadmap, overlaying its major components against Ethereum’s current Strawmap to show how protocol priorities have changed over the past three years.

The comparison reveals considerable continuity, but also a deeper architectural shift. Some research areas have moved higher in priority, most notably post-quantum security. More importantly, several areas that barely appeared in the 2023 diagram have become central to Ethereum’s long-term direction.

Ethereum Roadmap 2023 vs Strawmap: What Changed?

Buterin described the two roadmaps as having “a lot of overlap,” but the differences reveal how quickly Ethereum research has matured. The most obvious change is prioritization.

Quantum safety, which previously looked like a distant research problem, has moved much closer to the centre of protocol planning. EtherWorld recently explored why this urgency is growing in Researchers Crack Google’s Hidden Shor Optimization, as improvements in quantum algorithms continue to shorten assumptions around how long existing elliptic-curve cryptography can remain secure.

At the same time, some ideas have been deprioritized. Buterin specifically pointed toward VDFs and several EVM-related improvements. This does not necessarily mean the problems those proposals addressed disappeared. Instead, researchers increasingly have different tools available to solve them.

Nearer-term upgrades such as Glamsterdam continue improving the network Ethereum operates today, while Hegotá is increasingly connected with ideas around censorship resistance, account architecture & Ethereum’s longer-term transition.

Recent Glamsterdam testing shows how these long-range ideas eventually have to pass through client implementation, devnets, interoperability testing & public testnets before they can become part of Ethereum. The roadmap, therefore, is better understood as a continuously changing technical strategy rather than a fixed list of future hard forks.

Privacy & Quantum Security Move to the Front

Perhaps the clearest change since 2023 is Ethereum’s treatment of privacy. Buterin highlighted “first-class attention to strong privacy,” including keyed nonces, recent roots, aspects of FOCIL, Lean Privacy Pool research & wormhole-style mechanisms.

Privacy is increasingly being treated as infrastructure rather than an optional application feature. EtherWorld recently covered this shift through Vitalik’s short-term push toward native Ethereum privacy, which includes work around private reads, private writes, wallet-level protection & transaction inclusion.

At the access layer, Kohaku is exploring how shielded transactions and privacy infrastructure can be integrated more naturally into Ethereum wallets. Transaction inclusion is another piece of the same puzzle.

EtherWorld has previously examined how FOCIL and solo stakers could improve Ethereum’s censorship resistance, while work on the encrypted mempool aims to make transaction ordering and visibility harder to exploit. Parallel to privacy is Ethereum’s increasingly aggressive post-quantum strategy.

Ethereum currently depends on cryptographic systems including ECDSA account signatures, BLS validator signatures & KZG commitments. A sufficiently capable quantum computer could eventually threaten several of those assumptions.

Ethereum researchers are exploring an architecture in which quantum-safe signatures, zkVMs, proof aggregation & post-quantum data availability work together. That direction also overlaps with the work being explored through initiatives such as BEAM.

I updated my 2023 roadmap diagram to overlay where the items that were there sit in the current Strawmap ( https://t.co/9deLIQWG24 ).

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

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 10, 2026

STARKs, AI & the Push Toward Lean Ethereum

Another recurring theme in Buterin’s update is the growing role of STARKs. Ethereum increasingly appears to be moving toward a system where cryptographic proofs become first-class components across multiple protocol layers.

This transition is already visible across Ethereum’s broader ecosystem. EtherWorld’s overview of nine ZK projects shaping Ethereum in 2026 shows how zkVMs, prover infrastructure & proof aggregation are developing from specialized scaling technologies into increasingly general blockchain infrastructure.

Buterin said recursive STARKs could eventually appear at multiple levels of Ethereum. One particularly important concept is an “aggregate to union verified dependencies” primitive that could potentially be used across Ethereum’s Execution Layer, Consensus Layer & Data Layer.

Buterin argues that full formal verification of increasingly large portions of Ethereum may now be achievable because modern AI tools can help developers reason about specifications, generate proofs, identify edge cases & accelerate verification work.

This fits with his wider view of AI-secured blockchain infrastructure, where AI does not replace developers but becomes part of a verification-first engineering process. Researchers are exploring simpler instruction sets such as leanISA and RISC-V. In one possible future, developers could access these environments directly while the traditional EVM operates as an abstraction or intermediate representation above them.

New State Types & What Ethereum Could Become

The emergence of new state types may ultimately prove to be one of the most consequential differences between Ethereum’s 2023 and 2026 roadmaps. Instead of attempting to scale every possible Ethereum workload equally, specialized state mechanisms could impose more restrictive properties in exchange for substantially greater scalability.

Common activity such as token transfers and swaps could potentially operate through highly optimized state structures, while applications requiring maximum programmability could continue using more general state.

The same philosophy appears in zk-friendly execution “frames,” where specialized environments could optimize specific categories of computation rather than forcing every workload through one universal architecture. It represents a move from scaling everything identically toward designing different mechanisms for different workloads.

Vitalik’s Ethereum 2035 vision similarly described the next decade around scalability, privacy, resilience & Ethereum becoming broader global infrastructure. His earlier 2025–2027 roadmap showed the nearer-term path toward that destination.

The latest 2023-to-Strawmap comparison connects those pieces. Ethereum is increasingly converging around a future where privacy is native, cryptography is quantum-resistant, STARKs verify critical computation, AI assists formal verification, specialized state models unlock greater scalability & the underlying protocol becomes significantly leaner.

Ethereum’s roadmap is not designed to remain unchanged. It evolves as better cryptography, new research & improved engineering approaches emerge. It is attempting to become quantum-safe, privacy-first, censorship-resistant, formally verifiable, highly scalable & substantially simpler at the protocol level.

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Related Articles

1. Ethereum Introduces “Strawmap”: A Strawman Roadmap for Ethereum’s L1 Future
2. Vitalik Buterin Outlines Ethereum’s Lean Vision
3. Vitalik Buterin Outlines Ethereum’s 2025–2027 Roadmap at Devconnect
4. Researchers Crack Google’s Hidden Shor Optimization
5. Ethereum Encrypted Mempool: Progress, Challenges & the Road to Hegota

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