Ethereum 2023 roadmap overhauled: quantum safety and privacy now core
Ethereum’s blueprint for its own future looks almost nothing like it did three years ago. In a comparison posted this week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin laid the network’s 2023 upgrade plan directly against the Ethereum Foundation’s current draft, revealing that the Ethereum 2023 roadmap once anchored by different priorities has been substantially reshuffled, with quantum safety and privacy now sitting at the center of Ethereum’s long-term strategy.
Key takeaways
- Buterin overlaid Ethereum’s 2023 roadmap onto the Foundation’s current “strawmap” and found that privacy, quantum defenses, and non-EVM execution engines weren’t part of the original diagram at all.
- VDFs and many planned EVM improvements were deprioritized, while Verkle trees and state expiry were dropped in favor of newer constructions.
- The strawmap targets seven network upgrades by 2029, roughly one every six months, built around five long-term “north star” goals.
- Recursive STARKs proofs and AI-assisted formal verification are now treated as core dependencies for the protocol’s future correctness and speed.
- Ethereum’s fee base has shrunk 79% in eleven months, from $39.6 million in August 2025 to $8.3 million in July, cutting into the ETH burned through transaction fees.
Vitalik Buterin Reprioritizes Ethereum’s Roadmap for Quantum Safety and Privacy
Buterin’s own framing of the shift is blunt: some items on the old plan got reordered, some were shelved, and some were swapped for better designs entirely. What stands out most, he said, is the list of things that simply didn’t exist in the 2023 version — privacy protections, defenses against quantum computers, and the idea of an execution engine that goes beyond the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
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