Ethereum roadmap targets 2-second blocks and quantum security
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has added to a newly released roadmap detailing how Ethereum plans to speed up the production of new blocks and the verification of transactions.
Vitalik's comments on Thursday provided more detail on a visual public road map called “Strowmap” released by the Ethereum Foundation's protocol team.
“The fast spots are lost in their own lane at the top of the roadmap, and they don't seem to connect to anything,” Buterin said, adding that the rest of the roadmap is “very far from set time.”
The slot time is the time it takes Ethereum to produce new blocks, currently around 12 seconds. The roadmap aims to reduce this to two seconds to improve responsiveness.
“I expect we'll reduce the input time in an additional way,” Buterin said, noting the reduction from roughly 12 seconds to eight, six, four and finally down to two seconds with the square-root-of-two formula.
He also pointed out that p2p improvements, or improvements to how Ethereum nodes communicate with each other — such as sharing data without the need for new blocks and repeated data downloads — could significantly reduce distribution times, adding, “Shorter intervals are viable without any security trade-offs.”
From minutes to seconds
The second major improvement in the roadmap is that the point at which the transaction is considered irreversible is now around 16 minutes.
The future goal is to achieve the final level in between six and 16 seconds, replacing the current complex authentication system with a simple and quantum resistant one.
Related: Ethereum Foundation Lists ‘Quantum Readiness' For Gas Limits As 2026 Priorities
“The goal is to solve the gaps and the end state, allowing us to think of both separately,” Buterin explained.
This is a “very invasive set of changes,” he said, so the plan is to include the biggest step in each change with a “shift in cryptography, particularly toward post-quantum hash-based signatures.”
The resistance of quantum gaps before the end
Buterin said that the consequence of this approach could be quantum-resistant gaps before the end.
“One interesting result of the incremental approach is that there is a way to make gaps quantum-resistant much faster than making the final quantum-resistant.”
The network could reach governance “rapidly” if quantum computers suddenly emerge, he said, adding that “we'll lose the ultimate guarantee, but the chain will continue to flex.”
“Expect to see a progressive reduction in both inspection time and completion time,” Buterin summarizes.
Ethereum's slot structure and consensus creates a “pure, simple, quantum-proof, compliant, end-to-end formally verified alternative” for “body-to-body replacement.”
The timeframe for these changes is over the next four years, with approximately seven forks planned every six months. Glamsterdam and Hegota have already been confirmed and will be booked later this year.
Magazine: Bitcoin May Take 7 Years to Upgrade to Post-Quantum: BIP-360 Co-Author
