What’s Next for Scalability, Privacy, and Decentralization?

If we’re to be totally honest, Ethereum has not had a good run yet in 2025 and is down 40% over the last year. But that story seems to be flipping now.

Vitalik Buterin, the platform’s co-founder, has been the driving force behind its growth and has outlined an ambitious roadmap for Ethereum’s development. I’m not talking about simple tech upgrades. No, this is about making Ethereum more resilient, decentralized, and useful for everyone.

So, what’s on his mind for Ethereum’s next big chapter?

Ethereum’s Roadmap? It’s About People

Vitalik Buterin has made it clear: his focus for Ethereum in 2025 is two-fold.

1. Maximizing Ethereum’s Usefulness – Buterin isn’t just looking at Ethereum as a platform for transactions, but one where users truly benefit from its decentralized nature. Ethereum should be a space where people can leverage blockchain for real, meaningful use cases.
2. Strengthening Ethereum’s Backbone – For Vitalik, Ethereum’s decentralization isn’t negotiable. In fact, one of his main priorities is to tackle any weak spots in Ethereum’s system, ensuring the network remains secure, resilient, and free from central control.

For Buterin, Layer 1’s roadmap is at the center of these efforts. Key innovations such as single-slot finality, statelessness, and a long-term VM will help make Ethereum more scalable and secure. This is essential for keeping Ethereum competitive in an increasingly crowded blockchain space.

Embracing the competition

Cardano recently overtook Ethereum in developer activity. Buterin took this in stride, emphasizing the importance of full-stack security, open-source development, and privacy.

Ensuring that Ethereum remains secure and free of centralized intermediaries is central to his vision. This focus will affect everything, including wallets and dApps, as Ethereum continues to mature.

Looking Beyond the Core Protocol

Buterin’s ambitions extend far beyond Ethereum’s main protocol. His vision includes what he refers to as “big-picture d/acc” – a set of projects aimed at shaping Ethereum’s role in the broader decentralized world.

This involves developing communication tools, refining the social layer, and exploring governance mechanisms that are sustainable for the long term.

Additionally, Buterin is looking into cryptography, hardware, OS development, and even areas like bio-defense. These diverse interests hint at the immense scope Buterin has in mind for Ethereum, pushing the boundaries of what a blockchain can support.

There’s No Giving Up on Ethereum

While Ethereum’s growth is impressive, it hasn’t come without its critics.

Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, recently claimed that Ethereum might not last more than 15 years, predicting that Layer-2 solutions would eventually pull all the value away.

“I don’t think Ethereum will last more than ten or fifteen years. Layer-2 will siphon off all the value, and users will move elsewhere, ultimately overshadowed by Bitcoin,”

Buterin wasn’t fazed by this criticism. Instead, he responded with a bold new proposal: the Layer-Zero upgrade.

This was an ambitious proposal that could address Ethereum’s scalability issues head-on. By switching to a more efficient zkVM system, Vitalik believes Ethereum can become 30x faster and significantly cheaper to use. This upgrade, still in its early stages, could drastically improve transaction speeds and reduce costs, all while maintaining Ethereum’s decentralized nature.

It’s a direct challenge to critics like Hoskinson and proves that Ethereum is evolving, no matter what others say.