Vitalik updates 2023 Ethereum roadmap diagram: What has changed?

Vitalik Buterin has published a revised version of his 2023 Ethereum roadmap diagram, laying its old items over the Ethereum Foundation’s newer “Strawmap” to show which priorities held and which moved. 

In his X post that was shared on August 10, Buterin said the two diagrams share “a lot of overlap,” but a few things shifted in order of priority. 

Where is quantum safety on the roadmap compared to other items? 

Buterin stated that quantum safety has been up-prioritized. Some other items were deprioritized, though the example he linked was cut off in the post.

When the roadmap was shared in 2023, post-quantum work was just one concern among many.

Then he shrank the emphasis on verifiable delay functions, citing cryptographic weaknesses in existing constructions, and added research topics like obfuscation and delay-encrypted mempools. 

Two and a half years later, the direction has firmed up around defending Ethereum against future quantum computers.

What the Strawmap actually is

The document Buterin overlaid his old diagram onto is the L1 Strawmap, hosted at strawmap.org and maintained by the EF Architecture team of Justin, Thomas, Toni, and Buterin himself.

It is a blend of the words “strawman” and “roadmap.” It came about because the maintainers believe that no single roadmap can speak for a decentralized ecosystem.

For them, it is a discussion tool, and it worked in that respect in January 2026, where it began as a conversation starter at an EF workshop in January 2026.

The L1 strawmap organizes upgrades along a timeline of consensus, data, and execution layers and sets five “north stars” as end goals. 

The north stars are fast L1 with finality in seconds, a gigagas L1 handling 10,000 transactions per second, a teragas L2 reaching 10 million transactions per second, a post-quantum L1 with hash-based security, and a private L1 with shielded transfers built in. 

The draft sketches seven forks through 2029, on a rough cadence of one every six months, running through named upgrades like Glamsterdam and Hegotá.

The quantum work already has code behind it

On June 5, 2026, Buterin opened EIP-8288, which proposes a transaction frame type for post-quantum signatures and STARK aggregation. 

The design lets transactions declare cryptographic “dependencies” that a block builder can replace with a single recursive STARK proof, keeping the approach gas-efficient.

Asked on the Ethereum Magicians forum why the draft leans on the hash-based SPHINCS scheme instead of lattice-based signatures, Buterin said the team wants to be minimalistic and keep the base layer purely hash-based, which means maintaining less infrastructure overall.

In January 2026, the Ethereum Foundation put in place a dedicated post-quantum security team and is targeting core quantum-resistant infrastructure by 2029. Its work spans consensus signatures, data availability commitments, account signatures, and application-layer zero-knowledge proofs.

Why is Buterin reshuffling the strawmap now?

The prioritization of quantum safety is not exactly surprising, as there has been more breakthrough in the world of quantum computing, and its threats to encryption continue to gain more traction. 

However, there is AI tooling which Buterin also says could compress the roadmap’s schedule, having said AI helped draft a 2030 roadmap in two weeks rather than years.

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