Buterin’s 4-year Ethereum roadmap: Faster, quantum-resistant
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined further details of a newly published roadmap describing how the network plans to substantially accelerate block production and transaction confirmation.
Speaking on Thursday, Buterin elaborated on the public visual roadmap, “Strawmap,” released by the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol team. He noted that “fast slots” function in a largely separate track at the top of the plan and that most other components are broadly independent of slot time.
Slot time — currently about 12 seconds — is targeted to fall to as little as 2 seconds to make the blockchain feel more responsive. Buterin said he expects reductions to occur incrementally, following roughly a square‑root‑of‑two pattern from 12 seconds to 8, 6, 4, and eventually 2 seconds.
He added that peer‑to‑peer networking upgrades — including improvements to how nodes share new blocks and data without repeatedly downloading the same information — can significantly cut block propagation times, enabling shorter slots without security trade‑offs.
Finality targeted to drop from minutes to seconds
The second major change addresses finality — when a transaction becomes mathematically irreversible — which is currently around 16 minutes. The roadmap aims to bring finality down to between 6 and 16 seconds by replacing the existing complex confirmation process with a simpler system that is also quantum‑resistant.
Buterin said the objective is to decouple slot time and finality so each can be considered independently. Because these are extensive changes, the plan is to bundle the largest step with a cryptographic transition to post‑quantum hash‑based signatures.
Quantum protections for slots ahead of finality
Buterin noted that this incremental path could make slots quantum‑resistant before finality achieves the same standard. He said the network could “quite quickly” reach a point where, if quantum computers emerged, finality guarantees might be lost while the chain would continue to operate.
He added that both slot time and finality time should decrease progressively. A component‑by‑component replacement of Ethereum’s slot structure and consensus is intended to deliver a cleaner, simpler, quantum‑resistant, prover‑friendly, and end‑to‑end formally verified alternative.
The changes are planned over the next four years, with seven forks anticipated roughly every six months. Glamsterdam and Hegotá have been confirmed and are scheduled for later this year.
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