Vitalik Buterin's priorities for Ethereum have shifted significantly in recent years, with privacy and quantum security rising as particularly new and intense areas of concern.
On Monday, Buterin posted a comparison of Ethereum’s old roadmap as compared to the Ethereum Foundation’s latest "Strawmap," the reference guide for protocol upgrades through 2029, which was last updated on Aug. 4.
He noted that some tasks were not on the old roadmap at all, referencing a 2023 plan where he outlined Ethereum’s somewhat controversial series of multi-year updates from The Merge, to The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge. “What's most striking, however, is that some completely new things are in the strawmap that are NOT in this diagram, because they were not in the 2023 roadmap at all,” Buterin said on X.
Strong privacy Most notably, the network is now treating strong privacy as a core requirement.
That includes mechanisms meant to better hide user activity and balances, like privacy pools, along with designs that let people move value without exposing their full transaction history, like “ wormholes.” This also includes aspects of FOCIL, or Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, that will be a headliner upgrade for Ethereum’s planned Hegota hardfork.
