Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out an updated roadmap for the network’s next several years. He is calling it the biggest structural rebuild since Ethereum ditched mining in 2022.
Buterin wrote that Lean Ethereum “is not a single one-shot upgrade” but a series of improvements arriving over three or four years. He still called it the network’s third major iteration.
Buterin called Lean Ethereum “the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second,” adding that “almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced.”
The post follows a meeting of Ethereum researchers in Berlin in late June. That gathering continued discussions held with client teams in Svalbard back in April.
The changes touch nearly everything, from how the network confirms transactions to the cryptography protecting it from future quantum computers. Quantum safety has reportedly moved sharply up the priority list.
The centerpiece is a change in how the network checks itself, with recursive STARKs replacing the current model where every node re-executes every transaction. Buterin wants this enshrined as a core protocol component.
Privacy is also getting elevated treatment. Buterin described privacy as a first-class goal rather than an add-on, factored into pieces like the mempool and the state tree.
The roadmap includes ZK-unlinkable staking, a feature designed to let validators participate in consensus without exposing their transaction histories on-chain. That sits alongside a cheaper storage tier for simpler apps.
Buterin floated moving beyond the current EVM entirely, toward an instruction set such as RISC-V, once formal verification work matures. No timeline has been set for that transition.
Two nearer-term upgrades bridge today’s network to the Lean era. Glamsterdam is expected to deliver a substantial capacity increase, while the following fork, Hegotá, is likely Ethereum’s last before the Lean era begins.
Reaction has focused on the ambition of the plan against its timeline. One Ethereum Foundation researcher argued the three-to-four-year window “is very slow” and said it could realistically be done in about a year.
The roadmap lands during a rocky stretch for Ethereum’s institutions. The Ethereum Foundation is cutting its budget by about 40% this year and shed 54 jobs, roughly 20% of staff, in June.
The comments land as ether rallies more than 12% over the past week, among the strongest performances of the major cryptocurrencies. Whether the roadmap sticks to schedule remains the open question.
