Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a roadmap for the network to follow over the next few years, emphasizing the need for layer 2 scaling, wallet security, and privacy. In a blog post titled “The Three Transitions,” Buterin argued that these technical transitions must be addressed simultaneously to maintain key components of the protocol while providing a “global and permissionless experience to average users.”
Buterin wrote that layer 2 scaling is “crucial”, as without it, “every product aiming for the mass market inevitably forgets about the chain and adopts centralized workarounds for everything.” Ethereum is set to undergo a major upgrade later this year, Dencun, which will include a feature known as proto-sharding to help make rollups cheaper.
The second component, wallet security, involves moving all users’ wallets over to smart contract wallets. Buterin argued that this is needed so that users are comfortable with storing their cryptocurrency payments and data on-chain, otherwise they move over to centralized entities.
The final component, privacy, is also “crucial” according to Buterin, as users will have all their on-chain activity visible to the public. “It’s not just features of the protocol that need to improve; in some cases, the way that we interact with Ethereum needs to change pretty fundamentally, requiring deep changes from applications and wallets,” Buterin wrote.