Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has presented his personal roadmap for 2025, highlighting the direction he believes the Ethereum ecosystem should head. 

Buterin disclosed this in a recent post on the decentralized social platform Warpcast. His focus covers concepts around deep infrastructure upgrades to ideas about how Ethereum can support open technology and societal resilience.

Ethereum L1 Long-Term Roadmap

One of Buterin’s top priorities is making Ethereum’s base layer-1 faster, leaner, and more secure. A major part of this is something called single-slot finality, which would reduce the time it takes for Ethereum transactions to become final from around 15 minutes to just a few seconds. 

The proposed method would rely on “supercommittees” of about 125,000 validators to improve the process. While this may sound ambitious, it comes with trade-offs that will need careful handling to avoid weakening the network’s security.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum co-founder is also thinking long-term about the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the core engine that runs smart contracts. Buterin wants it to evolve to support newer cryptographic tools better and work more smoothly with scaling technologies like rollups.

Notably, the move toward a “stateless” Ethereum, where validators don’t need to store the entire history of the blockchain, could make running a node more accessible and encourage greater decentralization.

Full-Stack Security and Privacy

Also, Buterin has not forgotten Ethereum’s roots in decentralization and resilience, especially after past security setbacks like the 2016 DAO hack. He stressed that upgrades should always preserve the core values of security and openness, as the network scales and modernizes.

Security and privacy also feature in his 2025 focus, but not just at the protocol level. Buterin wants stronger protection all the way up the stack, from smart contracts to wallets to apps. 

He’s pushing for more robust open-source practices and tools that minimize the need for centralized intermediaries, which are often weak points in the system. 

In addition, privacy is getting more attention too, with technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, which are essential to keeping Ethereum users safe in an environment where governments and corporations are increasingly tracking online behavior.

Buterin also discussed what he calls “decentralized accelerationism,” or d/acc. For context, it is a response to today’s fast-moving tech landscape, which looks to keep power in the hands of users and communities, not corporations. 

Essentially, this means building decentralized communication tools, better governance systems, and more funding models for public goods. 

Other Important Areas

He’s also paying attention to areas like cryptography, open-source operating systems, and even bio-defense. These are fields where Ethereum and blockchain tech might help in making systems more secure and transparent. 

Meanwhile, he admitted to being less directly involved in some research areas, such as ongoing work in consensus design, peer-to-peer networking, and layer-2 hardware solutions. He also called attention to developments such as Danksharding and zkEVM, which are central to Ethereum’s scalability roadmap and could increase throughput by 2026.