Vitalik Buterin has described how the roadmap of Ethereum for the latest year differs from its 2023 roadmap. There are several points in both roadmaps that are similar; however, there are some changes in terms of technical priorities of Ethereum. First of all, quantum security became more important to developers because they started preparing for possible advances in computing technologies. At the same time, there is no mention of verifiable delay functions and some improvements of Ethereum Virtual Machine anymore.
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
Moreover, there were some changes in Verkle trees; they are now replaced by unified binary trees and PBT designs. In addition, there was a shift in the area of state expiry, which is now developed into new types of blockchain states. The new roadmap includes such priorities as privacy, post-quantum scaling, native rollups, and markets for the capacity of blob and gas in the future.
Privacy has emerged as a more important aspect of Ethereum’s long-term development approach. Buterin emphasized the usage of keyed nonces, recent roots, lean privacy pools, wormholes, and aspects of FOCIL. All of these can help reduce the metadata revealed about transactions and improve privacy in decentralized applications and wallets. The FOCIL aspect will be particularly useful in making Ethereum more resilient to transaction censorship by block builders.
Another emerging priority is that of quantum resilience. Developers are investigating LeanSPHINCS signatures, signature aggregation, and zkzk frames. All these can be helpful in preparing Ethereum for quantum attacks without any overheads in signature size, cost of verification, and network bandwidth.
With the improvement in zero-knowledge technology over the past years, native rollups have emerged prominently in Ethereum’s latest roadmap. Native rollups can potentially enable state transition validation within the Ethereum base layer, leading to more consistent scaling. Other possible innovations in Ethereum’s architecture include customized solutions for transactions, trading, and privacy applications.
The blob and gas futures can assist users in handling their future data and execution costs. Artificial intelligence may enable automation of formal verification, and STARKs can offer machine-verifiable proofs in execution, consensus, and data layers. However, Strawmap is just a coordination roadmap, and not a timetable.
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