Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says quantum resistance, privacy, and AI-assisted security have become greater priorities for the network since he published his 2023 roadmap.

In a post on X on Monday, Buterin said he updated his 2023 roadmap to compare its original goals with Ethereum's current "Strawmap"—a working outline of the network's long-term technical priorities.

"What's most striking, however, is that some completely new things are in the strawmap that are not in this diagram, because they were not in the 2023 roadmap at all," Buterin wrote. "These reflect changing priorities."

Among those priorities are stronger privacy and scaling designed for a post-quantum world, alongside efforts to push the "lean-ification of the spec," or simplify Ethereum's technical specifications.

"A common theme in scaling, found in both state types and zkzk frames (both new ideas), is that instead of trying to maximally scale all Ethereum activity," Buterin wrote. "We try to create specialized mechanisms that have more restrictive properties that make them more scaling-friendly, while supporting the heaviest loads incurred by users and applications today (eg. token transfers, swaps) and tomorrow (eg. privacy protocols)."

According to Buterin, advances in AI are making it practical to apply formal verification techniques more extensively to Ethereum. He said the network is increasingly relying on STARKs, a cryptographic technology used to verify computations, alongside AI-assisted verification to check that the protocol works as intended.

"This can only be safe with formal verification, which is itself only feasible with modern AI tools," he wrote.

Buterin's post comes as Ethereum has accelerated preparations for "Q-Day"—the anticipated arrival of quantum computers powerful enough to break current cryptographic systems. The threat is particularly acute for blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin, which rely on elliptic curve digital signatures (ECDSA) to secure wallet addresses and authorize transactions. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive private keys from public keys, putting funds directly at risk.

The urgency is not unique to Ethereum. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology published its first finalized post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024, signaling that governments and enterprises worldwide are racing to transition critical systems away from vulnerable algorithms.

In January, Buterin urged developers to adopt quantum-resistant cryptography before the threat becomes immediate, and the Ethereum Foundation formed a dedicated post-quantum team. In February, he outlined a phased plan to replace four potentially vulnerable components of Ethereum's cryptographic architecture.

In July, Buterin placed quantum safety and privacy at the center of his proposed "Lean Ethereum" overhaul, which calls for replacing quantum-vulnerable cryptography with quantum-safe alternatives.

"Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users' privacy first. Ethereum will be secure," Buterin wrote. "Ethereum will be censorship-resistant. Ethereum will be highly performant and scalable while satisfying the above. And Ethereum will be Lean."