Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Thursday outlined a four-year plan to cut the network's block production time from 12 seconds to as low as 2 seconds, reduce transaction finality from roughly 16 minutes to under 16 seconds, and introduce quantum-resistant cryptography through seven forks planned at roughly six-month intervals through 2029.
What Happened: Quantum-Resistant Overhaul
Buterin's comments expanded on a visual public roadmap called "Strawmap," released by the Ethereum Foundation's Protocol team. He described the plan as a series of incremental reductions to slot time — the interval at which Ethereum produces new blocks — following a roughly square-root-of-two formula from 12 seconds down through 8, 6, 4 and eventually 2 seconds.
"Fast slots are off in their own lane at the top of the roadmap, and do not really seem to connect to anything," Buterin said. He added that the rest of the roadmap is "pretty independent of the slot time."
Upgrades to how nodes share data, known as peer-to-peer improvements, can cut block propagation time significantly, "making shorter slots viable with no security tradeoffs," he said.
The second major overhaul targets finality, replacing the current confirmation system with a design that brings the guarantee of irreversibility down from 16 minutes to between 6 and 16 seconds.
"The goal is to decouple slots and finality, to allow us to reason about both separately," Buterin explained. He called the shift "a very invasive set of changes" and said the largest step would be bundled with a switch to post-quantum hash-based signatures — producing what he described as a "cleaner, simpler, quantum-resistant, prover-friendly, end-to-end formally-verified alternative."
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Why It Matters: Quantum-Proof Future
The incremental approach means the network could gain quantum-resistant block production well before finality itself is hardened. Buterin noted that if quantum computers suddenly appeared under this arrangement, "we lose the finality guarantee, but the chain keeps chugging along."
That distinction matters because it hedges the network against a technology that could otherwise render current cryptographic protections obsolete.
Seven forks in four years is an aggressive cadence, and each upgrade to a $200 billion network carries the risk of introducing critical bugs — but the alternative is arriving late to a quantum-computing reality that may not wait for Ethereum's convenience.
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