Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out an updated roadmap for the network that significantly reshuffles its priorities, elevating quantum safety and privacy to core protocol goals while deprioritizing some earlier scaling ideas — a shift he has described as the network's biggest overhaul since its 2022 move to proof-of-stake.
Dubbed “Lean Ethereum,” the plan spans three to four years and aims to touch nearly every major layer of the protocol while minimizing disruption to applications already built on top of it. Buterin said quantum safety has become a “substantially higher priority than before,” flagging quantum-safe blob designs — the technology underpinning Ethereum's rollup-based scaling approach — as an urgent area of work.
Replacing the cryptographic foundations
The roadmap proposes eventually replacing several cryptographic systems Ethereum currently depends on, including BLS signatures, KZG commitments and ECDSA, with post-quantum alternatives designed to remain secure even against a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. Rather than treating privacy as something built on top of the protocol, the plan evaluates every core component — including the mempool and future state structures — by whether it can support privacy without intermediaries and without meaningful added overhead.
Five long-term targets
Buterin outlined five strategic goals underpinning the plan: faster layer-1 finality, a layer-1 throughput target of one gigagas per second — enough to support tens of thousands of transactions per second under peak conditions — a teragas-level vision for layer-2 scaling, comprehensive quantum-resistant cryptography, and native privacy transfers built directly into the base layer rather than left to third-party tools.
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A shift in what Ethereum optimizes for
The reordering of priorities is notable given how much of Ethereum's roadmap over the past several years centered on scaling through rollups. By elevating quantum resistance and native privacy alongside throughput, Buterin is signaling that the network's long-term competitiveness now depends as much on security assumptions holding decades into the future as it does on transaction speed today — a bet that will shape how Ethereum's core developer teams prioritize work over the next several years.
