By popular demand, an updated roadmap diagram for 2023!

Here was the one from last year. Notice that it's actually quite similar! As Ethereum's technical path forward continues to solidify, there are relatively few changes. I'll go through the important ones.

Here was the one from last year. Notice that it's actually quite similar! As Ethereum's technical path forward continues to solidify, there are relatively few changes. I'll go through the important ones.

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1588669782471368704

The role of single slot finality (SSF) in post-Merge PoS improvement is solidifying. It's becoming clear that SSF is the easiest path to resolving a lot of the Ethereum PoS design's current weaknesses.

See:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/280

https://ethresear.ch/t/17989

Significant progress on the Surge (rollup scaling) this year, both on EIP-4844 and from rollups themselves.

https://l2beat.com/scaling/summary continues to be a good page to follow.

Also, cross-rollup standards and interop has been highlighted as an area for long-term improvements.

The Scourge has been redesigned somewhat. It's now about fighting economic centralization in PoS in general, in two key theaters: (i) MEV, (ii) general stake pooling issues.

See also:

https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/staking_2023_10

https://ethresear.ch/t/9022

https://ethresear.ch/t/17944

Significant progress in the Verge; Verkle trees are coming closer to being ready for inclusion.

See: https://verkle.info

"Increase L1 gas limit" was removed to emphasize that the limit can be raised *at any time*; no need to wait for full SNARKs esp for small increases.

"State expiry" has been shrunk, to reflect a general consensus that it's a fairly low-priority and low-urgency item esp given stateless clients and PBS / execution tickets.

VDFs have been shrunk to reflect a temporary reduced emphasis, due to cryptographic weaknesses in existing constructions:

https://ethresear.ch/t/16670

Deep crypto (eg. obfuscation) and delay-encrypted mempools have been added to reflect growing research interest in these topics.