Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published his takeaways from an updated long-term roadmap on Saturday, describing the Lean Ethereum effort as a complete overhaul of almost every major component of the network, comparable in scope to the Merge.
"Lean Ethereum is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years," Buterin wrote on X. "But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced."
The post followed a researcher meeting in Berlin in late June, the second such gathering after a client team session in Svalbard in April. The revised draft roadmap is published at strawmap.org, a document that Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake introduced in February.
The replacements Buterin listed span how the network verifies transactions, through recursive STARKs instead of direct re-execution; the cryptography protecting wallets and contracts from future quantum computers; how quickly blocks reach finality; how the chain handles gas across multiple dimensions; and what types of state the network stores and how it stores them. He said the transition would be done "in a way that minimizes disruption to existing applications," pointing to the Merge as evidence the network can execute a shift of this scale.
"We've done this before, we can do it again," he wrote.
Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 4, 2026
The updated strawmap is at https://t.co/HZEerH1xxI, and I attached a picture of it to this post.
My… pic.twitter.com/KPGayHSySf
Hegota as the last pre-Lean fork
Buterin named the upcoming Hegota upgrade as probably the last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. He said that starting from the following upgrade, designated I-star, most of what the protocol delivers will carry a strong Lean character in one way or another.
Hegota follows Glamsterdam in Ethereum's scheduled upgrade sequence. Glamsterdam was originally expected in the first half of 2026 and has yet to activate. Buterin said a large gas limit increase is expected with Glamsterdam, giving more transaction capacity per block. He said gas limit increases, blob increases, and slot time reductions will happen many times over roughly the next five years, with each step dependent on reaching the point where it is safe to proceed through a combination of client optimization and protocol changes.
Storage changes as the most disruptive piece
Buterin said the changes to state are "probably the single most disruptive part of the plan." The current design keeps all Ethereum state in a single format that is expensive to maintain and store. The roadmap envisions keeping that system largely intact for complex applications while adding a new, cheaper storage tier for simpler ones.
He described a possible Ethereum in 2030 with 2 terabytes of present-day-style dynamic state and 100 terabytes of new-style scalable but more restrictive state. ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, and many DeFi use cases would work well in the new tier. Complex objects such as Uniswap contracts or onchain order books would remain on the existing system.
No application would be forced to migrate. But Buterin said the cost incentive would be significant.
"It will be very cost-effective to, for example, rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have more than 10x lower transaction fees," he wrote.
He said the design of these new state types, with current ideas including keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, and temp state, would require substantial feedback from application developers and several rounds of iteration.
Buterin also said the protocol would need to work out the incentive structure for who stores the much larger total state and why they are willing to serve it. "Even saying each node stores 1% is not good enough," he wrote, calling this a first-class research area.
Quantum safety and privacy elevated to first-class goals
Quantum safety has moved up significantly in priority. Buterin said finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent and that the work has already been underway for months. The concern is that future quantum computers could break the cryptography securing addresses, signatures, and the proof systems underpinning the network.
Privacy received equal emphasis.
"Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal," Buterin wrote.
He said new features are now designed from the start around the question of how private transactions would flow through them and what overhead that creates. The question asked explicitly when designing mempools, frames, and state tree additions is how quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through the system.
He also noted that formal verification of everything has become a security priority, and that it makes the team more comfortable with canonicalization, meaning defining parts of the protocol directly in bytecode. He cited evm-asm as being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM.
The long-term case for replacing the EVM
Buterin revisited the question of what computing environment should ultimately power Ethereum. He named RISC-V and leanISA as the most likely long-term candidates to replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine, though he acknowledged that outcome is still far away.
His stated ideal is a network in which the EVM becomes a compiler-level feature at the programming language layer, with the protocol itself only seeing RISC-V or leanISA directly. That would make it far cheaper to prove transaction validity through recursive STARKs and easier to build privacy into applications at the base layer.
The proposal has faced opposition since Buterin first proposed a RISC-V swap in April 2025. Researchers at Offchain Labs, the core developer behind Arbitrum, argued last November that WebAssembly is the better choice. It did not appear among the contenders Buterin listed on Saturday.
The post came roughly a week and a half after the Ethereum Foundation completed a restructuring that removed 54 staff members, approximately 20% of its workforce. Buterin closed by writing "Ethereum is CROPS," a reference to the censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security properties he has said should define the foundation's narrowed focus.
Ether trades near $1,760, up about 0.58% on the day, according to HodlFM's market data.
Tanya Petrusenko
Disclaimer: All materials on this site are for informational purposes only. None of the material should be interpreted as investment advice. Please note that, despite the nature of much of the material created and hosted on this website, HODL FM operates as a media and informational platform, not a provider of financial advisory services. The opinions of authors and other contributors are their own and should not be taken as financial advice. If you require advice, HODL FM strongly recommends contacting a qualified industry professional.
