Vitalik Buterin Reveals Ethereum’s (ETH) Future Plans – Here’s What’s Planned

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin presented the network’s new roadmap, which includes its short-, medium-, and long-term goals, at the Developer Conference held in Japan today.

Scalability, cross-layer compatibility, privacy, and security were the prominent topics in Buterin’s speech.

Buterin stated that the short-term focus will be on increasing gas limits on the Ethereum mainnet (L1). He said that tools such as block-level access lists, ZK-EVMs, gas price restructuring, and slot optimization will be used in this context. The goal is to maintain the network’s decentralization while increasing scalability.

The medium-term goal is to enable trustless asset transfers between Layer-2 (L2) networks and achieve faster transaction finality. In this context, “Stage 2 Rollup” solutions, proof-of-conduct combinations, and optimizations for reading data from L1 are on the agenda. Furthermore, network optimizations such as shortening slot times, fast finality protocols, and erasure coding are planned to improve user experience and security.

Buterin emphasized that privacy is a priority for both the short and medium term. Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, anonymous pools, encrypted voting, and scrambling network solutions are highlighted to protect the privacy of users’ on-chain payments, voting, DeFi transactions, and account changes. Furthermore, secure execution environments, secret query techniques, and the ability to conceal fraudulent requests and data access patterns are also targeted when reading data from the chain.

Buterin’s long-term vision highlights a minimalist, secure, and simple Ethereum. This roadmap includes resistance to the risks posed by quantum computers, securing the protocol with mathematical methods (formal verification), and transitioning to ideal cryptographic solutions.

Buterin stated that these strategic steps will transform Ethereum into a more scalable, user-friendly, and secure infrastructure. With the strengthening of L2 networks, more users will be able to use Ethereum with less trust assumptions. The ultimate goal is for Ethereum to become a reliable foundational infrastructure for global financial and technological systems.

*This is not investment advice.