Ethereum News Today: Vitalik Compares 2023 Roadmap With Strawmap

What Changed Between Ethereum’s 2023 Roadmap and Strawmap? 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published a side-by-side look at how the network's 2023 roadmap stacks up against its newest planning document, Ethereum News Today. 

In a post on X, he walked through what stayed the same, what got reshuffled, and what's completely new, giving the public its clearest look yet at where Ethereum's core research priorities actually stand today, according to the official Strawmap site.

Source: VitalikButerin X

What Happened With Buterin's Roadmap Comparison

Buterin overlaid his old 2023 Ethereum roadmap diagram onto the current Strawmap and shared the results publicly. His takeaway: there's a lot of overlap, but enough has moved around that it's worth walking through. 

The roadmap is maintained by the Ethereum Foundation's protocol team, specifically Justin Drake, Thomas, Toni, and Buterin, and it started as a discussion document at an internal workshop in January 2026. 

It's not an official promise. The site calls it "a strawman roadmap," a working draft meant to spark debate rather than lock anything in, sketching out roughly seven upgrades through 2029.

Why This Roadmap Comparison Matters

Roadmaps shift constantly in a project as large and decentralized as Ethereum, but seeing what changed in the ETH roadmap and why shows where researchers think the real problems are right now. It's not marketing; it's Buterin checking his own past assumptions against where things actually stand.

What Got Reordered or Replaced in the Ethereum news today

Most of what appeared in 2023 is still somewhere in the Ethereum news today. A few things simply moved or got swapped for better versions of themselves:

• Quantum safety jumped up the priority list. That's the effort to protect ETH from future quantum computers that could eventually break today's cryptography.

• A handful of older ideas got dropped, including VDFs (a kind of cryptographic timer) and a number of smaller EVM tweaks. The EVM is Ethereum's core computing engine, the part that actually runs smart contracts.

• Some plans evolved into stronger versions. An earlier data-storage design called Verkle trees grew into newer, more capable structures, and a separate idea called "state expiry," which would have deleted old unused data, was replaced by an entirely different approach to organizing that data.

What's Brand New and Wasn't There Before

The part of Buterin's comparison that stands out most is the list of ideas that weren't in the 2023 roadmap at all:

• Privacy built directly into the protocol, rather than bolted on, covering tools that shield transaction details by default.

• Post-quantum scaling, using new signature and compression techniques designed to stay fast and cheap even after quantum-safe upgrades roll out.

• A "lean," simplified protocol spec, written so it can be checked through formal mathematical proofs, something Buterin says only became realistic recently thanks to modern AI tools.

• Blob and gas futures, a financial tool for hedging future network costs. The concept simply didn't exist as an idea back in 2023.

• Native rollups, letting ETH run its scaling layers directly inside the base protocol, something only possible now that the underlying cryptography, called SNARKs, has matured enough to support it.

• A rethink of the EVM itself, with researchers exploring whether ETH should eventually offer developers a simpler, more modern computing engine instead of today's EVM.

What Comes Next for Ethereum's Development Priorities

Buterin points to a common thread in the newer additions: instead of trying to scale every ETH activity equally, the plans favor purpose-built systems tuned for the heaviest real-world uses, like payments, swaps, and privacy tools. 

The other consistent theme is a heavy reliance on STARKs, a type of cryptographic proof, paired with AI-assisted formal verification technology Buterin says the protocol team is now comfortable betting Ethereum's future on. 

He summed up the direction in five goals: ETH should be quantum-safe, privacy-first, secure, censorship-resistant, and highly scalable, all while staying lean. 

The Ethereum news today is still a living document, expected to update at least quarterly, so this comparison is a snapshot of where things stand right now, not a final answer.

Disclaimer

This article is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered financial or investment advice. Always conduct your own research before making investment decisions.