Buterin explains 4-year roadmap for faster, quantum-resistant Ethereum

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has added to a newly released roadmap outlining how Ethereum plans to dramatically speed up the production of new blocks and the confirmation of transactions.

Vitalik’s comments on Thursday offered more detail on a visual public roadmap called “Strawmap” released by the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol team.

“Fast slots are off in their own lane at the top of the roadmap, and do not really seem to connect to anything,” said Buterin, noting that the rest of the roadmap is “pretty independent of the slot time.”

Slot time is the time it takes for Ethereum to produce new blocks, currently around 12 seconds. The roadmap aims to get this down to as fast as 2 seconds, so the blockchain feels more like a live, responsive system rather than something that has to be waited for.

“I expect that we’ll reduce slot time in an incremental fashion,” said Buterin, suggesting reductions following a roughly square-root-of-two formula from 12 seconds down through 8, 6, 4, and eventually as low as 2 seconds.

He also suggested that p2p improvements, or upgrades to how Ethereum nodes communicate with each other — such as sharing new blocks and data without the need to download repeated data — can greatly reduce block propagation time, “making shorter slots viable with no security tradeoffs.”

Ethereum Strawmap depicts a four-year roadmap. Source: Ethereum Foundation

Finality from minutes to seconds

The second major improvement in the roadmap is to finality, or the point at which a transaction is mathematically guaranteed to be irreversible, which is currently around 16 minutes.

The future goal is finality between 6 and 16 seconds, achieved by replacing the current complicated confirmation system with a cleaner, simpler one that’s also quantum-resistant.

“The goal is to decouple slots and finality, to allow us to reason about both separately,” explained Buterin.

He said this was a “very invasive set of changes,” so the plan is to bundle the largest step in each change with a “switch of the cryptography, notably to post-quantum hash-based signatures.”

Quantum resistance of slots before finality

Buterin said that a consequence of this approach would be quantum-resistant slots before finality.

“One interesting consequence of the incremental approach is that there is a pathway to making the slots quantum-resistant much sooner than making the finality quantum-resistant.”

The network might “quite quickly” get to a regime where, if quantum computers suddenly appear, “we lose the finality guarantee, but the chain keeps chugging along,” he said.

“Expect to see progressive decreases of both slot time and finality time,” Buterin summarized.

The “component-by-component replacement” of Ethereum’s slot structure and consensus will produce a “cleaner, simpler, quantum-resistant, prover-friendly, end-to-end formally-verified alternative.”

The timescale for these changes is over the next four years, with seven forks planned roughly every six months. Glamsterdam and Hegotá are already confirmed and slated for later this year.

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