Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin unveiled a set of ambitious goals for the network’s next phase of development, coinciding with a new milestone in ecosystem engagement.
In an April 30 post, Buterin outlined key areas of focus for 2025, including faster transaction finality, stateless client architecture, enhanced privacy features, and stronger decentralization across the stack.
Buterin’s announcement comes as the Ethereum network hit a record high in active users. Onchain data shows that over 15.4 million unique addresses interacted with Ethereum-based applications over the past week, with nearly 13.45 million of them operating on Layer-2 solutions.
Among Buterin’s top priorities is researching single-slot finality, a protocol change that would reduce the time it takes to finalize transactions to just 12 seconds.
He also emphasized the need for stateless clients, which would shift the burden of storing Ethereum’s full state from network nodes to users, improving scalability and resilience.
Privacy remains a central theme in Buterin’s vision. Following his earlier publication of a short-term roadmap on Ethereum privacy, he reiterated the importance of creating user-friendly tools that preserve confidentiality without sacrificing transparency or security.
Buterin also signaled a growing interest in Ethereum’s broader ecosystem, extending beyond technical upgrades. His roadmap includes plans to support decentralized infrastructure, encrypted messaging platforms, improved developer documentation, and new models for open-source funding and governance.
He further expressed interest in building systems to facilitate trusted information exchange, including prediction markets and other emerging tools for collective coordination.
While Buterin will not be directly involved in all areas of Ethereum development, he noted that expanding the gas limit and improving peer-to-peer communication remain important objectives for the wider developer community.
His renewed research focus follows recent changes at the Ethereum Foundation, which have given him greater freedom to pursue long-term innovation. Co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak recently noted that Buterin’s involvement often accelerates breakthroughs within the ecosystem.
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