The Ethereum roadmap is evolving into a completely new plan

Core Points

Ethereum is incorporating possible future constraints into design considerations in advance, rather than waiting until problems occur before responding to them.

Expansion strategies are shifting from "universal" to "professional".

EVM compatibility may continue without relying on EVM as an infrastructure.

The improvement in the complexity of cryptography has made the importance of machine-assisted verification increasingly prominent.

Old protocol assumptions are increasingly being re-examined and may be replaced.

Vitalik Buterin compared the roadmap he released in 2023 with the current Ethereum "draft map", highlighting ideas whose priorities have shifted and been replaced, as well as research areas that were almost absent in the previous plan.

Vitalik Buterin's 2023 Ethereum roadmap divides development efforts into six major segments: mergers, surges, disasters, margins, cleansing and squandering.

The deeper change lies at the architectural level. Quantum resistance, privacy protection and formal verification are increasingly affecting the way Ethereum expands, and some parts of the protocol that were once considered relatively fixed, including the role of the EVM itself, have also entered the realm of design discussions.

The current Ethereum "draft diagram" reorganizes the development of the consensus layer, data layer and execution layer, with a greater focus on cryptography, privacy, extensibility, and protocol simplification.

Quantum security is becoming a design constraint

For years, the Ethereum community has been discussing the issue of quantum resistance. What has really changed is its place in the roadmap.

Buterin said that the priority of quantum security has been greatly increased. In addition to security issues, this also creates a practical problem: Post-quantum signatures may be much heavier than the cryptographic solutions currently used by Ethereum.

Therefore, networks cannot simply view quantum resistance as a signature replacement many years later. Any alternative must also be compatible with Ethereum's extended goals.

EIP-8288 shows how these two issues start to overlap. The proposal introduces a framework that allows expensive cryptographic dependencies, including post-quantum signatures, to be aggregated through recursive STARK proof, rather than having each transaction bear its full verification costs independently.

This was critical long before quantum computers had the ability to attack Ethereum.

Replacing underlying cryptography after a threat appears will force wallets, accounts, verifiers and protocol infrastructure to coordinate under pressure. Integrating these constraints into the design in advance gives researchers the space to simultaneously address performance cost issues.

Forward-looking work at Ethereum has identified multiple cryptographic components that ultimately require quantum-resistant alternatives.

Equal expansion of everything is losing appeal

Another change in the Buterin update could have a broader impact on daily use of Ethereum.

Together, the new state types and the zkzk framework embody an increasingly important idea: Ethereum does not have to allow all possible calculations to maximize scalability in exactly the same way.

Certain workloads dominate actual use. Token transfers and redemption have created huge demand, and privacy applications may become another heavily loaded category in the future.

If these activities can be run under stricter rules, Ethereum has the potential to build mechanisms specifically to handle them, greatly improving efficiency without forcing all applications to follow the same set of optimization strategies.

Buterin's description of the new state type clearly reveals this transition. He sees it as not just a replacement for an old state, outdated solution, but also a way of thinking about the expansion itself.

The specialization path can bring greater performance improvements for common activities, but there may also be too many special cases that may lead to the client team having to maintain more different mechanisms.

Therefore, Ethereum's efforts to promote "streamlined protocols" must coexist with this specialization. As workloads are handled more customized, the pressure to simplify their underlying common mechanisms increases.

EVM is no longer an unshakable assumption

This pressure has also hit Ethereum's execution architecture.

Ethereum has no plans to remove EVM. But its permanent role at the bottom of the agreement is no longer taken for granted.

The post-quantum zkzk framework may require Ethereum to expose an instruction set outside of EVM. Buterin listed leanISA and RISC-V as potential candidates because they are simpler and more modern.

Once such an instruction set exists within Ethereum, limiting it to a single narrow protocol function will become increasingly difficult to justify.

Developers may eventually gain more direct access to it. Looking further into the future, Buterin raises the possibility that EVM could serve as an intermediate presentation layer, running on top of a simpler underlying instruction set, rather than being deeply embedded in the underlying protocol.

This will separate two concepts that have been bundled together in the history of Ethereum: EVM compatibility and EVM-defined architecture.

In theory, applications can retain the environment and tools they rely on, while the underlying mechanisms become simpler.

This is still highly speculative. Buterin made it clear that even with the current "draft map", it is too early to conduct more in-depth exploration.

For a network with a large application ecosystem, starting a redesign of its bottom-level protocol role is enough to illustrate how potential the current simplification effort has.

Rollup technology is returning to the basics

The roadmap also demonstrates the rapid maturity of zero-knowledge technology.

Native Rollup did not appear in the 2023 roadmap because, according to Buterin, SNARK technology at the time was not mature enough to make it a reality. The newer roadmap embeds the certification system deeper into Ethereum's architecture.

Ethereum's expansion strategy still relies heavily on Layer 2 Rollup. However, some of the cryptographic mechanisms developed around the ecosystem are now also beginning to generate value to Ethereum itself.

Recursive proof compresses expensive calculations, supports privacy protection, and helps accommodate cryptographic systems that would otherwise place a heavier burden on the protocol.

Over the years, most of Ethereum's extended innovations have migrated outward from the base layer into Rollup. Now, the research results developed there are beginning to feed back the agreement.

Native Rollup is an example. The aggregation of proof of reuse across different Ethereum layers could be another example.

The line between "L1 technology" and "Rollup technology" is becoming blurred.

Why AI is important for a more streamlined Ethereum

Moving more proof mechanisms into the protocol raises another problem: Reusable cryptographic components improve efficiency while also concentrating risk.

A primitive shared at the consensus, data and execution layers reduces duplication, but flaws in this component can affect multiple parts of Ethereum at the same time. As these dependencies deepen, relying solely on testing to ensure security has become insufficient.

Buterin pointed out that AI-assisted formal verification is part of the solution.

Formal verification uses mathematical methods to prove that software behavior conforms to its specifications. AI does not replace these certificates; its potential value lies in helping researchers and engineers generate, inspect and maintain them at a scale that was previously difficult to achieve.

This gives "streamlining Ethereum" a more specific meaning.

The goal is not to make every cryptographic mechanism easy to understand at a glance, but to keep the core specifications sufficiently constrained and clear so that key components can be formally verified rather than relying mainly on traditional testing.

More reuse reduces protocol duplication without requiring developers to fully trust increasingly complex sharing mechanisms.

As a result, AI's role in Ethereum may be far less visible than running agents or executing transactions, and it may help make complex infrastructure secure enough to become part of the protocol itself.

Some of Ethereum's old design options are reviewed

Comparing these two roadmaps reveals a fact often hidden in individual upgrade announcements: Ethereum is becoming willing to give up certain ideas after years of research.

The priority of VDF has been lowered. Verkle-based plans have evolved into other structures. Status expired is being replaced by a new status type. Native Rollup, stronger privacy mechanisms, post-quantum extensions, and blobs and gas futures occupy almost no space in the 2023 plan.

Ethereum has also experienced major turns before. Its original sharding strategy has changed dramatically as Rollup has become a better expansion path, and the project's own roadmap document also uses it as an example to illustrate how development priorities have evolved.

Evolution of the Ethereum Roadmap: 2023 vs. Current Draft Map

(Changes, upgrades, or replacements in key architectural priorities)

Research Areas: Quantum Resistance- 2023 Roadmap Status: Low/Long-term Priorities-Current Draft Map Priority: Significant Improvement; Proactive Design Constraints

Research Areas: EVM Flexibility- 2023 Roadmap Status: Unshakable Foundation-Current Draft Priority: Open Redesign (Consider leanISA / RISC-V)

Research Areas: Native Rollup and SNARK - 2023 Roadmap Status: Immature Technology-Current Draft Map Priority: Deep Integration into the Base Layer Architecture

Research Areas: Verifiable Security (AI)- 2023 Roadmap Status: Traditional manual testing-Current draft diagram priority: AI-assisted formal verification has increased importance

Research areas: Verkle tree/ VDF - 2023 roadmap status: Core areas of concern-Current draft diagram priority: Evolving into other structures/lowering priority

This willingness to revisit seemingly established assumptions is also reflected outside the roadmap. Draft EIP-8363 proposes that as pledge participation rates increase, more and more verifier rewards will be destroyed, challenging the current economic incentives to support higher pledge levels.

Pledge proposals and architectural roadmaps address different issues, but point in the same direction: When researchers believe that existing protocol behavior conflicts with new goals such as decentralization, security, or efficiency, they are considered adjustable.

This makes the "draft map" useful even if many parts change again in the future. It shows what attributes Ethereum researchers increasingly want to retain, even if it means replacing mechanisms that were once seen as part of long-term plans.

Roadmaps are increasingly less like commitments to specific technologies and more like tests of which technologies are still worth retaining.