Buterin's roadmap comparison puts privacy and quantum safety first

Vitalik Buterin posted a side-by-side comparison of Ethereum's 2023 roadmap against the current L1 Strawmap on August 10, and the overlay shows privacy and quantum safety climbing in priority while other items got cut or replaced entirely.

Strawmap itself is not new terminology invented for the occasion. It is a portmanteau of "strawman" and "roadmap," introduced by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake at an EF workshop in January and maintained since as a living planning document, last revised August 4. The name is deliberate: the document is explicitly framed as a draft meant to be challenged and revised, not a schedule Ethereum has committed to shipping.

“In general, a lot of overlap, but: Some things got reshuffled in order (eg. quantum safety up-prioritized). Some things deprioritized (eg. VDFs; many EVM improvements). Some things replaced with superior constructions.”

— Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, X post

Two technical proposals anchor the privacy push. Keyed nonces, formalized as EIP-8250, replace Ethereum's single sequential sender nonce with a bounded set of independent nonce keys, so a transaction from a shared address, common in privacy protocols where many users transact from one address to avoid linking their activity, no longer has to wait behind every other pending transaction from that same address. A separate shielded pool, outlined in EIP-8182, would give Ethereum a protocol-managed system contract for native private ETH and token transfers directly at the base layer, without a proxy, admin key, or pause mechanism.

The data-structure change is real but more open-ended than a simple swap. Verkle trees, Ethereum's earlier plan for lighter state proofs, rely on elliptic-curve cryptography that isn't secure against a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, and NIST has recommended phasing out that class of cryptography by 2030. The roadmap now points toward a unified binary tree structure, EIP-7864, which depends only on hash functions and stays secure under quantum attack models, with a further evolution Buterin abbreviates "PBT." Which specific hash function anchors that structure, current documentation lists BLAKE3 as the default with a Poseidon variant under active security review, remains an open decision rather than a settled one.

Buterin closed his post with a five-part statement of intent rather than a technical claim: quantum-safe, privacy-first, secure, censorship-resistant, and highly performant while satisfying all of the above, plus one addition he called simply "Lean." Strawmap's own version of that list targets roughly seven hard forks through 2029, spaced about six months apart, alongside newer additions absent from the 2023 plan entirely, including AI-assisted formal verification and post-quantum signature schemes.

• Keyed nonces (EIP-8250) let privacy-protocol users share a sender address without blocking each other's transactions
• Shielded pool (EIP-8182): a protocol-managed system contract for native private transfers at L1, no admin key or pause
• Verkle trees are being replaced by a unified binary tree (EIP-7864) for post-quantum security; the exact hash function is still under review
• Strawmap targets roughly seven hard forks through 2029; VDFs and many EVM improvements were deprioritized

Reaction inside Ethereum's research community has been mixed on pace rather than direction. Some researchers called the plan exciting while still flagging the multi-year timeline as slow, and the roadmap update lands not long after a separate staking proposal, EIP-8363, drew its own backlash over tokenomics concerns. Quantum readiness itself is becoming a shared industry concern well beyond Ethereum: a group including BlackRock and Coinbase recently pledged funding toward quantum-proofing Bitcoin, underscoring that the timeline pressure Buterin is responding to isn't unique to any one chain.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.