But Ethereum now treats replacing any quantum-vulnerable part with a quantum-secure alternative as urgent, Buterin said, including a redesign of the cheap data storage that rollups, the layer-2 networks built on top of Ethereum, depend on.
Privacy has been elevated to what Buterin called a “first-class goal” rather than an afterthought. The plan calls for designing core network components so that private, disintermediated transactions can pass through them by default.
The way the network controls itself is also changing. Instead of each node running each transaction again, Ethereum plans to rely on recursive STARKs. This cryptographic proof method allows a node to verify a compact proof that the work was done correctly, instead of repeating it. That change is intended to make the network faster and easier to run.
As such, the change Buterin has flagged as most disruptive is for what Ethereum calls the state. State is a blockchain’s current memory, the complete snapshot of everything that exists on a network at a particular point in time.
Think of it as the running record of each account balance and all the data these contracts contain (such as who owns which NFT, how much is in a lending pool, each token ledger) from the most recent block.
