Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Thursday detailed a four-year roadmap that aims to cut the network's block production time from 12 seconds to as low as 2 seconds, slash transaction finality from roughly 16 minutes to under 16 seconds, and introduce quantum-resistant cryptography through seven forks planned at roughly six-month intervals.
What Happened: Faster Blocks, Quicker Finality
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, adding that the rest of the roadmap is "pretty independent of the slot time."
Upgrades to how nodes share data with each other, known as peer-to-peer improvements, can significantly cut block propagation time, "making shorter slots viable with no security tradeoffs," he said. The second major overhaul targets finality, replacing the current confirmation system with a cleaner 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."
Why It Matters: Quantum-Proof Security
An 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."
"Expect to see progressive decreases of both slot time and finality time," he said. Two of the seven planned forks — Glamsterdam and Hegotá — are already confirmed and scheduled for later this year.