Buterin outlines Lean Ethereum plan: quantum, privacy, scaling

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, named quantum safety, scalability and privacy as the network’s top technical priorities in a new Lean Ethereum strawmap. He wrote the upgrades will roll out over the next three to four years and will affect nearly every protocol layer.

Buterin posted the strawmap on X and compared the scale of the work to the September 2022 Merge that moved Ethereum from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

The strawmap sketches a timeline running roughly from 2026 through 2029.

Buterin elevated quantum resistance, writing “Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority,” and said finalizing a quantum-safe solution for blobs “has become urgent.”

Blobs are off-chain data payloads used by rollups and other scaling features. The plan also promotes privacy as a ‘first class goal’ and proposes deeper changes to Ethereum’s execution environment, including development of a new virtual machine modeled on leanISA or RISC-V to support programmable privacy and improve throughput.

Contributors say the upgrades will affect consensus, networking, execution and data availability layers.

Dankrad Feist, a researcher behind the payments-focused layer-1 Tempo blockchain, praised the technical direction but called the three-to-four-year timetable too long, saying artificial intelligence could help developers ship the upgrades within a year. Crypto analyst Ignas Fiodorovas welcomed the priorities but questioned whether the Ethereum Foundation can meet the proposed schedule, citing the organization’s history of delayed rollouts and noting the strawmap does not address changes to Ether’s tokenomics as prices have fallen.

The strawmap appeared as the Ethereum Foundation reduced staff by roughly 20 percent and cut its budget by about 40 percent. Several executives and contributors have departed in recent months, including Hsiao-Wei Wang, Tomasz Stańczak, Tim Beiko and Barnabé Monnot.

The Lean Ethereum strawmap sets a technical direction for the remainder of the decade that emphasizes quantum resistance, privacy and improved scalability, and it lays out work the community and developers will need to coordinate across Ethereum’s architecture.