Ethereum's long-term vision is to develop a 'Lean Ethereum' model that emphasizes security, simplicity, and optimization, including quantum-resistant cryptography and formal verification, aiming for a secure and simplified version of the protocol.

This future version of Ethereum also explores privacy enhancements and cryptographic advancements, with ongoing research into ideal primitives for hashing, signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs.

At EDCON 2025 in Osaka, Vitalik Buterin unveiled a new technical roadmap for Ethereum, outlining both immediate scaling solutions and long-term protocol improvements to strengthen the network.

During the Japan Developer Conference, Buterin emphasized that these strategic goals aim to make Ethereum a stable, trustworthy foundation for the decentralized ecosystem, extending beyond just scalability.

A major focus is on Layer 2 solutions, which are expected to significantly enhance scalability, interoperability, and user experience, targeting a tenfold increase in Ethereum's capacity within the next year.

In the short term, Ethereum plans to increase the Layer 1 gas limit while maintaining decentralization, employing techniques like block-level access lists, ZK-EVMs, gas price adjustments, and slot optimization to boost security and performance.

Medium-term goals include improving cross-Layer-2 interoperability through trustless asset transfers, proof aggregation, and faster settlement, leveraging technologies like erasure coding and three-stage finalization.

Vitalik highlighted the importance of advancing network speed, finality, and fault tolerance through innovations such as erasure coding and data propagation improvements, with a long-term vision of achieving quantum resistance.

Privacy remains a central theme, with efforts divided into protecting on-chain 'writes'—via zero-knowledge proofs, encrypted voting, and mixnets—and safeguarding 'reads' through trusted execution environments and private information retrieval.