Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared details on 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 changes to the protocol that will be rolled out gradually over the next three to four years, rather than a one-off update.
Buterin said Ethereum researchers met in Berlin two weeks ago to reevaluate the long-term direction of the protocol, following discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April. Buterin said Lean Ethereum represents the third major phase for Ethereum after the merger.
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 crucial topic is quantum security. Buterin said replacing cryptographic structures vulnerable to quantum attacks on Ethereum with quantum-secure alternatives is now a much higher priority. He specifically mentioned that it had become urgent to make the blob design quantum-secure and that work in this area had been continuing for months.
Significant changes are also planned to the consensus structure as part of the Lean Ethereum initiative. According to Buterin, ETH will evolve toward a simpler, faster, and theoretically more secure structure that separates the usable chain from the finality mechanism, thus providing finality in one or two rounds.
The roadmap highlights a multi-dimensional gas model, client architecture changes, protocol simplification and improved sustainability. Buterin said this transformation will be designed to minimize disruption to existing applications, recalling that Ethereum had already successfully transitioned on a similar scale with Merge.
According to Buterin, the most striking and potentially game-changing part of the plan will be related to the state structure of Ethereum. There is a growing consensus on the need to preserve the current structure of the “dynamic state” to a large extent, but to develop it only to a limited extent; Conversely, addition of new types of states, more scalable but more restrictive.
Buterin said an Ethereum architecture model for 2030 could include 2TB of current-style dynamic state and 100TB of new but more limited scalable state. He noted that this new state type could be very suitable for ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, and many DeFi use cases, but might not be equally suited to Uniswap contracts, on-chain order books, or more complex centralized structures.
Buterin said 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 a more than tenfold decrease in transaction fees. Ideas considered for new state types include keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, and transient state.
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Ethereum is also aiming for a significant change in its approach to privacy. Buterin said privacy is no longer an afterthought, but a primary focus. He explained that when designing frameworks such as frames, mempool and state tree, the methods by which quantum-secure, middleman-free transactions without privacy would flow through these structures, as well as the additional costs involved, were clearly considered.
Buterin also said that Ethereum would need a virtual machine outside of the EVM. He explained that at least a LeanISA-like framework would be necessary for recursive STARKs, adding that user access to this framework would bring significant gains in terms of programmable privacy and better scalability. Among the current candidates, leanISA and RISC-V stand out.
Buterin said 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 such as RISC-V or leanISA. However, he added that this was a long-term goal.
On the other hand, Ethereum gas limit increases, blob capacity increases, and slot duration reductions are expected to occur repeatedly over the next five years or so. Buterin said he expects the Ethereum gas limit to significantly increase with the upcoming Glasterdam update. He noted that each scaling increase or slot duration reduction will be implemented when made secure through client optimizations and protocol changes.
*This does not constitute investment advice.
