Vitalik Buterin overlaid his 2023 Ethereum roadmap diagram onto the Ethereum Foundation's current strawmap on Monday and said the most striking part of the comparison is the set of items that were not on the 2023 diagram in any form: privacy, defenses against quantum computers, and an execution engine that reaches past the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
The overlay documents how far Ethereum's plans for its own base blockchain have moved in under three years. Quantum safety was pulled forward, and two projects that anchored the 2023 diagram were replaced outright. Buterin also tied Ethereum's technical direction to two dependencies that carried nowhere near this weight in 2023: a family of cryptographic proofs called STARKs, and the use of artificial intelligence to mathematically verify the protocol's code.
The strawmap — a combination of "strawman" and "roadmap" — is the Foundation's draft plan for upgrading Ethereum's base layer, published in the open and revised roughly quarterly. It is maintained by the Foundation's Architecture team of Justin Drake, Thomas Thiery, Toni Wahrstätter and Buterin, and lays out seven network upgrades by 2029 at a rough cadence of one every six months.
The document sets five long-range targets it calls "north stars." Transactions should be confirmed and settled with finality in seconds. Ethereum itself should handle 10,000 transactions per second, using zero-knowledge proofs of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or zkEVMs, which let a computer check that a block was processed correctly without redoing the work. Layer 2 networks should reach 10 million transactions per second. The cryptography should hold for centuries against quantum computers. And the base chain should support shielded transfers that hide payment details.
