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Vitalik Buterin compares Ethereum's 2023 upgrade roadmap with the current development reference "straw map"
On August 10, Vitalik Buterin released a comparison comparing Ethereum's 2023 upgrade roadmap with its current development reference-"straw map". This "straw map" was last updated on August 4 and covers agreement changes planned until 2029. Buterin's post on the X platform detailed what content has changed, what has been canceled, and what has been added since the original plan was formulated.
The 2023 roadmap divides Ethereum's development into a series of named phases, from "The Merge" to "The Surge","The Scourge","The Verge","The Purge" and "The Splurge". Several elements in the plan have been realigned, downgraded, or replaced with updated methods. Improvements to the Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) and a series of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) have been scaled back. Verkle trees have been replaced by the unified binary tree approach, and state expiration has given way to what Buterin calls a "new state type."
The most eye-catching thing is what has never appeared before
Buterin said that the most significant point about this comparison is not what content has changed its position, but that something appears in the "straw map" that does not exist at all in 2023. "The most striking thing... is that there are some new elements in the 'straw map' that are not present in this chart because they simply don't exist in the 2023 roadmap," he wrote on X.
Privacy has shifted from a marginal issue to a core protocol requirement. The updated roadmap covers mechanisms designed to hide user activity and balances, including privacy pools and "wormholes"-mechanisms that allow value transfers without exposing full transaction history. It also includes content on the Fork Select Mandatory Include List (FOCIL), a feature that is expected to be the highlight of the Pectra hard fork in the Ethereum plan. Quantum security has been significantly elevated in priority and is now part of a broader effort that Buterin calls "Lean-Itification," a series of changes that could ultimately revise or replace almost all core components of the protocol.
STARK and AI are now considered core building blocks
Two technologies that were either immature or non-existent in 2023 now support most of the updated plan. Zero-knowledge STARK proof appears at multiple levels of the protocol, including the execution layer, consensus layer, and data layer. Buterin said a specific primitive he calls "aggregation into joint verification dependencies" is expected to be used in all three levels. Native Rollup was not feasible in 2023 because SNARK technology was not mature enough, and is now part of the plan. Blob and Gas futures-concepts that didn't exist three years ago-have also been added.
AI-assisted formal verification has been included as a basic hypothesis rather than a future possibility. Buterin wrote that complete formal verification of all content in Ethereum was "possible only because of modern AI tools," and the protocol is now clearly built around this capability.
"Lean" efforts include the possibility of opening up alternative computing formats such as RISC-V and leISA to developers, reflecting a greater shift in the concept of extension. Buterin described the change as a shift from trying to uniformly expand all Ethereum activities to building specialized mechanisms for high-load use cases such as token transfers, exchanges, and privacy protocols.
The "straw map" is described as a dynamic draft that may be revised at any time rather than on a fixed schedule. In June 2026, the Ethereum Foundation laid off 20% of its employees and reorganized around five clusters, focusing on censorship resistance, open source development, privacy and security. At the same time, two new organizations-EthLabs and EthSystems-have also been formed to support Ethereum's growth and institutional adoption.
