After Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced cypherpunk principles, the project has come up with a new draft roadmap, called ‘Strawmap.’ This time, the focus areas are privacy, quantum resistance, Layer-2 scaling, and faster settlement times.
Ethereum Foundation’s Strawmap: Five long-term goals
Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, put forward the Strawmap proposal, a strategic five-year vision document outlining potential future hard forks, technical goals, and research directions. The proposal is more like a coordination tool that draws a possible path for Ethereum’s protocol evolution through 2029.
Let’s take a look at what the five key features mean.
- Faster finality for Layer-1: The document proposes reducing settlement time, enabling speedy irreversible transactions on Ethereum’s base layer.
- Quantum-resistant cryptography: This denotes upgrading the cryptographic tools of the Ethereum protocol to combat quantum computing. As of now, Ethereum uses elliptic curve cryptography to resist against classical computers.
- Gigagas Layer-1 scaling: The throughput of L-1 will increase to nearly 1 billion gas per second.
- Huge Layer-2 scaling: The five-year vision proposal also includes a feature that helps Layer-2 networks scale millions of instant transactions. This dramatically boosts L-2 capacity to 10 million transactions per second.
- Built-in privacy for transfers: Typically, most of the current privacy options use add-on protocols. Strawmap, however, considers privacy-preserving transactions as a major protocol feature for Ethereum transfers.
For years, Ethereum has been criticized for slow scaling and strong reliance on Layer-2 networks. The latest move of the Ethereum Foundation is a notable milestone.
According to Jeongmin, a crypto analyst, Ethereum’s gigagas target for Layer-1 throughput is a significant move that would happen through zkEVMs or zero-knowledge proofs, allowing the blockchain to process millions of transactions per second.
Buterin’s cypherpunk principle also focuses on privacy
Last week, Buterin introduced a “Cypherpuk-principled non-ugly Ethereum” with the core intention to enhance censorship resistance, improve privacy and scalability, and simplify the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
The common notable features in both the Strawmap and cypherpunk vision are privacy and high throughput/scalability. And the reason for this is very clear: Ethereum, the trailblazing DeFi and smart contract platform, sees both the features as inevitable to make the network truly private, decentralized, and usable at a massive scale.
