StarkWare announced the release of the Cairo roadmap, and the new contract syntax and Starknet alpha v0.12.0 will be released soon. StarkWare will make a major change to the smart contract syntax in the next Cairo release and upgrade the version to Cairo v2. Upcoming new functions or features for Cairo include allowing contracts to import components defined in external libraries, Keccak and Secp-k1 allowing verification of Ethereum signatures on upcoming Starknet versions, signed integer support, Secp-r1 curve operations, char strings and iterators etc. Additionally, StarkWare's next steps include a backward compatibility guarantee.