3 min read
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out an updated vision for the blockchain's next several years, billing it as the most sweeping rebuild since the network ditched mining and declaring that Ethereum is "reinventing itself."
In a tweet on Saturday, Buterin shared his takeaways from a recent gathering of Ethereum researchers in Berlin, along with a refreshed "strawmap," a draft roadmap published at strawmap.org. He framed "Lean Ethereum," first sketched out in 2025, as the protocol's third major iteration, on par with the 2022 Merge that moved Ethereum to proof-of-stake. Almost every major component will be replaced over three or four years, he said, without forcing existing apps to migrate.
The centerpiece is a change in how the network checks itself. Instead of every node re-executing every transaction, Ethereum would verify a compact cryptographic proof of the chain using recursive STARKs, a form of zero-knowledge proof that Buterin wants "enshrined" as a core protocol component.
He also floated a simpler consensus with one or two-round finality, multidimensional gas pricing, and, eventually, a shift beyond the EVM toward an instruction set such as RISC-V.
Guarding against the threat posed by Q-Day has climbed the agenda, Buterin said, with anything cryptographically vulnerable due to be swapped for quantum-safe alternatives, and work on quantum-resistant "blobs" already months along.
Privacy, he wrote, is now a "first-class goal" rather than an add-on, factored into pieces like the mempool and the state tree, and the whole effort would rest on formal verification.
The most disruptive piece concerns data storage. Buterin sketched a 2030 network holding roughly 2TB of today's flexible "dynamic" state alongside 100 terabytes of a new, more scalable but restrictive type, well suited to tokens, NFTs, and much of DeFi, if less so to complex contracts like decentralized exchanges. Rewriting an ERC-20 token onto the new storage would not be mandatory, he said, but could cut its fees more than tenfold.
None of it arrives at once. Buterin said the coming Hegotá fork will likely be Ethereum's last before the "Lean" era begins, with a large gas-limit increase expected at the nearer-term Glamsterdam upgrade and further gains in capacity and speed over roughly five years.
The plan lands at a lean moment for the Ethereum Foundation itself, which recently cut staff and tightened its budget, while previous Ethereum upgrades faced repeated delays before implementation.
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