TLDR Tech / Crypto
Vitalik's Lean Ethereum Roadmap: The Third Major Iteration
Vitalik Buterin's post-Berlin summit thread frames 'Lean Ethereum' as the protocol's third major iteration, a 3-4 year rollout replacing most major protocol components, with the Lean ethos taking hold from the I-star fork onward. The overhaul covers recursive STARKs for verification, quantum-safe cryptography across the full stack (now urgent, with quantum-safe blob design actively in progress), one-to-two-round finality with a decoupled available chain, multidimensional gas, and a dual-tier state model projecting 2 TB of dynamic state alongside 100 TB of scalable but more restrictive state by 2030. Privacy is now a first-class design constraint integrated into mempool, Frames, and state tree decisions. Formal verification covers all protocol components, and the EVM may be supplemented by leanISA or RISC-V for recursive STARK execution environments. Existing applications require no migration, but ERC20s and NFTs rewritten to use the new UTXO-style state storage could see transaction fees fall by more than 10x.
Read the full story