Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared his key areas of focus for the network’s development this year, emphasizing infrastructure upgrades for faster transaction finality, smart contract enhancements, and increased privacy.
In a recent post on Farcaster, Buterin detailed his research priorities, including achieving “single-slot finality,” which aims to make transactions irreversible within a single 12-second block. He also plans to investigate making Ethereum “stateless,” a change that could boost scalability and decentralization by reducing the data nodes need to store.
Furthermore, Buterin highlighted the importance of bolstering cybersecurity, resilience, and decentralization across the Ethereum ecosystem, extending these goals to client software like third-party wallets. His vision emphasizes a future Ethereum that is “highly secure, free of centralized intermediaries and privacy-friendly.”
This announcement comes as the Ethereum network reached a new milestone, with over 15.4 million unique addresses interacting with the ecosystem in a single week, according to GrowThePie data. Notably, the majority of this activity, nearly 13.45 million addresses, occurred on layer-2 protocols.
Beyond core protocol development, Buterin also intends to focus on improving communication tools, information sharing, and the social aspects of the Ethereum community. This includes exploring governance changes, resource management, open-source funding, and the development of better encrypted messaging and software documentation. He even hinted at potential work on prediction markets and novel communication tools.
