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- Vitalik Buterin published an updated roadmap for “Lean Ethereum,” which he describes as the third major iteration of the network after the 2022 merger.
- The plan would replace “almost every major part of the protocol” over three to four years, enshrining recursive Stark proofs and replacing weak quantum cryptography with quantum-secure alternatives.
- Buterin said privacy is now a “first-class goal” and a future Ethereum rollout will contain more data through new, more scalable types of states.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out an updated vision for Ethereum blockchain Over the next several years, he described it as the most comprehensive rebuilding process since the network abandoned mining and announced it Ethereum He is “reinventing himself.”
In a tweet On Saturday, Buterin shared his thoughts from a recent meeting of Ethereum researchers in Berlin, along with an updated “straw map,” a draft roadmap published in stramap.org. He framed “Lean Ethereum,” first charted in 2025, as the third major iteration of the protocol, on par with the 2022 merger that moved Ethereum to proof-of-stake. Almost all major components will be replaced over three or four years, without forcing existing applications to migrate, he said.
Change country
The key focus is a change in how the network inspects itself. Instead of each node re-executing each transaction, Ethereum will verify a built-in cryptographic proof of the chain using recursive STARKs, a form of cryptography. Proof of zero knowledge Buterin wants to “enshrine” it as an essential component of the protocol.
He also introduced simpler consensus with one or two rounds of finality, multi-dimensional gas pricing, and, eventually, a shift beyond EVM toward an instruction set like RISC-V.
Quantitative integrity, privacy and data storage
Guarding against the threat it poses Q day Buterin said this project has been high on the agenda, as anything vulnerable to encryption will be replaced with quantum-secure alternatives, and work on quantum-resistant “blobs” has been underway for months.
He wrote that privacy was now a “first-order goal” and not just an add-on, had been decomposed into parts such as the memory array and the state tree, and the entire effort would depend on formal verification.
The most annoying part is about data storage. Buterin charted a 2030 network containing roughly 2 terabytes of the current flexible “dynamic” state along with 100 terabytes of a new, more scalable but constrained type, well suited to the 2030 network. Symbols, NFTsand a lot of Decentralized financeif less so for complex contracts such as decentralized exchanges. Rewrite a ERC-20 He said the tokenization on the new volume would not be mandatory, but it could reduce his fees more than tenfold.
None of it arrives at once. Buterin said coming Higota fork It will likely be the last Ethereum coin before the “Lean” era begins, with a significant increase in cap gas expected in the near term. Glamsterdam Upgrading and achieving further gains in capacity and speed over approximately five years.
The plan falls at a difficult moment for the Ethereum Foundation itself, which recently started Cutting staff and It tightened its budgetwhile experiencing previous Ethereum upgrades frequent Delay Before implementation.
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