Ethereum Prepares for a Major Overhaul

Ethereum is preparing for another major transformation. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled the vision behind Lean Ethereum, a long-term roadmap that will shape the network's next phase of development following the Merge upgrade.

The changes will not arrive all at once. Instead, they will be introduced gradually over the next three to four years. According to Buterin, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin two weeks ago to redefine the protocol's future direction, building on earlier discussions with client teams held in Svalbard.

One of the roadmap's key goals is replacing the current verification system with recursive STARK proofs, which are expected to become a core part of the protocol. Quantum resistance is also becoming a top priority. Developers are working to replace existing cryptographic components with quantum-secure alternatives, while improving the security of blob technology has been identified as an urgent task.

Lean Ethereum also aims to simplify the network's consensus mechanism. The goal is to make Ethereum faster, more efficient, and capable of achieving transaction finality within one or two rounds. The roadmap further includes a multidimensional gas fee model, improvements to client architecture, and an overall simplification of the protocol while maintaining compatibility with existing decentralized applications.

Perhaps the most significant changes concern Ethereum's state architecture. While the current state model will remain supported, its future growth will be limited. Alongside it, new and more scalable state types will be introduced. Buterin estimates that by 2030 Ethereum could consist of around 2 TB of the existing dynamic state and up to 100 TB of the new state model. This approach is expected to work particularly well for ERC-20 tokens, NFTs and many DeFi applications, although it may be less suitable for more complex smart contracts such as Uniswap or fully on-chain order books.

Migration to the new architecture will remain optional. However, Buterin believes that moving an ERC-20 token to the new UTXO-based model could reduce transaction fees by more than tenfold.

Privacy is another area receiving greater attention. According to Buterin, it is no longer viewed as an optional feature but as one of Ethereum's core development priorities. Looking further ahead, the network could also adopt a new virtual machine based on architectures such as leanISA or RISC-V. In that vision, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) would eventually serve primarily as a compiler layer, although this remains a long-term objective.

Buterin also confirmed plans to continue increasing Ethereum's gas limit, blob capacity, and reducing slot times. A significant gas limit increase is expected to arrive with the upcoming Glasterdam upgrade, with additional improvements to follow as the protocol undergoes further optimization.