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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared details about the “Lean Ethereum” roadmap, which he describes as the third major long-term evolution of the Ethereum protocol.
According to Buterin, this process will consist of a series of major protocol changes that will be rolled out gradually over the next three to four years, rather than a one-off update.
Buterin stated that Ethereum researchers met in Berlin two weeks ago to reassess the long-term direction of the protocol, following discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April. Buterin said that Lean Ethereum represents the third major phase for Ethereum after Merge.
One of the key aspects of the roadmap will be the use of recursive STARKs instead of direct re-execution in the verification process. The goal is to make recursive STARKs a native and fundamental verification component of the Ethereum protocol.
Another critical topic is quantum security. Buterin stated that replacing cryptographic structures vulnerable to quantum attacks on Ethereum with quantum-secure alternatives is now a much higher priority. He specifically mentioned that making the blob design quantum-secure has become urgent, and that work in this area has been ongoing for months.
Significant changes are also planned in the consensus structure under the Lean Ethereum initiative. According to Buterin, ETH will move towards a simpler, faster, and theoretically more secure structure that separates the usable chain from the finality mechanism, providing finality in one or two rounds.
The roadmap highlights a multi-dimensional gas model, changes to the client architecture, simplification of the protocol, and making it more future-proof. Buterin stated that this transformation will be designed to minimize disruption to existing applications, recalling that Ethereum previously successfully completed a transition on a similar scale with Merge.
According to Buterin, the most striking and potentially most change-inducing part of the plan will be related to Ethereum’s state structure. There is a growing consensus on largely preserving the current “dynamic state” structure, but only scaling it to a limited extent; conversely, adding new, more scalable but more restrictive state types.
Buterin stated that a model Ethereum architecture for 2030 could include 2 TB of current-style dynamic state and 100 TB of new, scalable but more limited state. He noted that this new state type could be quite suitable for ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, and many DeFi use cases, but might not be equally suitable for Uniswap contracts, on-chain order books, or more complex centralized structures.
Buterin stated that rewriting existing implementations would not be mandatory, but that, for example, migrating an ERC-20 token to the new UTXO storage design could result in transaction fees decreasing by more than tenfold. Ideas being considered for new state types include keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, and transient state.
Ethereum is also aiming for a significant shift in its privacy approach. Buterin stated that privacy is no longer an afterthought, but a primary goal. He explained that when designing frameworks like frames, mempool, and state tree, the methods by which quantum-secure and intermediary-free privacy transactions would pass through these structures, and the additional costs involved, were clearly considered.
Buterin also stated that Ethereum would need a virtual machine outside of the EVM. He explained that at least a leanISA-like structure would be necessary for recursive STARKs, adding that user access to this structure would provide significant gains in terms of programmable privacy and better scalability. Among the current candidates, leanISA and RISC-V stand out.
Buterin stated that, in an ideal scenario, he wants EVM to become a feature at the high-level language compiler level, with the protocol focusing directly on constructs like RISC-V or leanISA. However, he added that this is still a long-term goal.
On the other hand, increases in Ethereum’s gas limit, blob capacity increases, and slot duration reductions are expected to come up many times in the next five years or so. Buterin stated that they expect a significant increase in the Ethereum gas limit with the upcoming Glasterdam update. He noted that each scaling increase or slot duration reduction will be implemented when made safe through client optimizations and protocol changes.
*This is not investment advice.