Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an updated roadmap outlining technical priorities and changes relative to the Ethereum Foundation's Strawmap plan.

New priorities

The roadmap highlights a set of technical directions focused on privacy, quantum safety, simplification, fee stability, and native scalability solutions for the protocol.

• Privacy and censorship resistance: enhancing user confidentiality and increasing network resilience against blocking or content-based interference at protocol level.
• Quantum-safe protection: designing scalable defenses against quantum attacks that could undermine existing cryptographic primitives in the long term.
• Simplified architecture: reducing protocol complexity by consolidating components and clarifying execution and consensus responsibilities across layers.
• Gas futures and BLOBs: introducing mechanisms such as futures on gas and BLOB commitments to stabilise fee expectations and record costs.
• Native rollups: enabling rollup-style transaction aggregation with execution occurring directly at the L1 execution layer for tighter integration and efficiency.
• Instruction set evolution: exploring a move to a more modern instruction set to reduce direct protocol dependence on the EVM and broaden implementation options.

Technical context

Buterin noted that several of these directions were technically infeasible or not actively considered a few years ago, due to limitations in tooling and deployment strategies.

Objective

The stated aim of the updated roadmap is to make Ethereum simultaneously quantum-safe, private, censorship-resistant, scalable, and architecturally simpler for future development and adoption.