Vitalik Buterin lays out new Ethereum roadmap at EDCON
New short and long-term priorities include L1 gas boosts, ZK-EVMs, privacy reads, and a lean, quantum-resistant Ethereum
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin | John Phillips/Getty Images for TechCrunch/"593513273GS310_TechCrunch_D" (CC license)
At EDCON 2025 in Osaka, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered fresh details of Ethereum’s technical roadmap, delineating both short-term scaling goals and longer-term protocol transformations.
The immediate priority, according to slides from the presentation, is scaling at the L1 level by raising the gas limit while maintaining decentralization. Tools such as block-level access lists, ZK-EVMs, gas repricing, and slot optimization were highlighted as means to improve throughput and efficiency.
A central theme of the presentation was privacy, divided into protections for on-chain “writes” (transactions, voting, DeFi operations) and “reads” (retrieving blockchain state). Write privacy could be achieved through client-side zero-knowledge proofs, encrypted voting, and mixnet-based transaction relays.
Read privacy efforts include trusted execution environments, private information retrieval techniques, dummy queries to obscure access patterns, and partial state nodes that reveal only necessary data. These measures aim to reduce information leakage across both ends of user interaction.
In the medium term, Ethereum’s focus shifts to cross-Layer-2 interoperability. Vitalik described trustless L2 asset transfers, proof aggregation, and faster settlement mechanisms as key milestones toward a seamless rollup ecosystem. Faster slots and stronger finality, supported by techniques like erasure coding and three-stage finalization (3SF), are also in scope to enhance responsiveness and security.
The roadmap also includes Stage 2 rollup advancements to strengthen verification efficiency, alongside a call for broader community participation to help build and maintain these improvements.
The long-term “Lean Ethereum” blueprint emphasizes security, simplicity and optimization, with ambitions for quantum-resistant cryptography, formal verification of the protocol, and adoption of ideal primitives for hashing, signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs. Buterin stressed that these improvements are not just for scalability but to make Ethereum a stable, trustworthy foundation for the broader decentralized ecosystem.
This is a developing story.
This article was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by editor Jeffrey Albus before publication.
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