Common Knowledge Base Association (CKBA) (@ckba_build): There’s an interesting connection between two of the biggest changes in Vitalik’s updated Ethereum roadmap.

There’s an interesting connection between two of the biggest changes in Vitalik’s updated Ethereum roadmap. The first is that quantum safety has clearly moved up the priority list. The work being discussed is substantial: leanSPHINCS, signature aggregation, zkzk frames to make post-quantum signatures economical, and formal verification as part of the path toward getting there. The second is architectural. Vitalik suggests that those zkzk frames could eventually expose a simpler ISA such as leanISA or RISC-V, with the EVM becoming an IR on top rather than something permanently enshrined in the base protocol. These may look like separate roadmap items, but they point toward the same underlying lesson: the less you permanently bake into the base protocol, the easier it is to change the things above it. That is especially relevant now that quantum safety is becoming a concrete engineering priority rather than a abstract concern. CKB was designed around this idea from the beginning. CKB-VM has used RISC-V since mainnet launch, but RISC-V itself is only part of the story. The VM is deliberately crypto-agnostic, so cryptographic verification can be implemented as ordinary executable code in Scripts rather than hard-coded into the protocol. That’s what gives CKB crypto agility. A new signature scheme such as SPHINCS+ can be deployed as a Lock Script without changing CKB’s consensus rules, and users can migrate when they need to. Interestingly, when Vitalik first proposed replacing the EVM with RISC-V in 2025, he pointed to CKB-VM as one of the precedents. Ethereum is now treating quantum safety as a major protocol priority. Different architectures and different paths, but the direction is familiar: Keep the base protocol simple, general and stable. Make everything that may need to evolve programmable.