Ethereum News: Vitalik Buterin Reveals Ethereum’s Biggest Upgrade Since the Merge

Key Insights:

• Ethereum news in focus amid plans for core protocol upgrades.
• New state designs could reduce ERC20 transaction fees by more than 10 times.
• Vitalik Buterin outlines a multi-year roadmap focused on scaling and protocol redesign.

Ethereum News has turned to Ethereum’s long-term roadmap following Vitalik Buterin’s outline of a major protocol redesign. The update followed research meetings in Berlin and earlier discussions with client teams in Svalbard.

Buterin said the plan, called “Lean Ethereum,” will not arrive through one upgrade. Instead, it will unfold across three or four years and replace several major parts of the network.

In addition, Vitalik Buterin described Lean Ethereum as the third major version of Ethereum. He compared its scale to the Merge, which changed Ethereum’s consensus model.

This time, researchers are looking at verification, consensus, state design, privacy, quantum safety, and client architecture. The plan also aims to reduce disruption for existing applications.

Ethereum News: Vitalik Buterin Details Lean Ethereum Architecture

Vitalik Buterin said Lean Ethereum will move verification toward recursive STARKs instead of direct re-execution. Under the plan, recursive STARKs would become a core protocol component. The roadmap also includes replacing quantum-vulnerable parts with quantum-safe alternatives.

Consensus changes form another major part of the plan. Vitalik Buterin said researchers are working on a decoupled chain with availability and finality. The goal includes one-round or two-round finality. He said the design should become simpler and faster than Ethereum’s current model.

The roadmap also includes multidimensional gas and changes to available state types. Buterin said Ethereum will not only change its tree structure, it will also reconsider what types of state the protocol supports.

Client architecture is also expected to change. However, Buterin said the work will include simplification and cleanup. He added that Ethereum completed a major transition before through the Merge.

Privacy and Quantum Safety Move Higher

The update placed privacy closer to the center of Ethereum design. Buterin said privacy is no longer an afterthought. Researchers now consider privacy when designing Frames, the mempool, and state tree additions.

The roadmap asks how quantum-safe and intermediary-free privacy transactions will move through these systems. It also weighs the overhead those transactions create. This approach connects privacy work directly to protocol design.

Formal verification also plays a larger role in the roadmap. Buterin said formal verification would improve security across the protocol. In addition, It could also support canonicalization, where parts of Ethereum are defined directly as bytecode in a specific language.

The post, in addition to Ethereum news, also mentioned evm-asm. Buterin said it is being written partly as a canonical proof system for the EVM. He linked this work to Ethereum’s broader move toward formally verified components.

State Changes Could Bring the Biggest Disruption

Vitalik Buterin identified state changes as the most disruptive part of the roadmap. He said researchers are leaning toward keeping present-day dynamic state mostly unchanged. However, they may scale it only by a medium amount.

The plan on Ethereum news would add new state types that are more scalable but more restrictive. Buterin gave a possible 2030 example that Ethereum could have 2 TB of present-day dynamic state and 100 TB of new-style state.

That new-style state could work well for ERC20s, NFTs, and many DeFi use cases. However, it may not fit highly centralized objects such as Uniswap contracts. It may also not fit on-chain order books or other complex structures.

Vitalik Buterin added that applications would not need to rewrite immediately. Still, some apps could lower transaction fees by adopting newer designs. He cited a possible ERC20 rewrite using UTXO storage under exploration.

That design could reduce transaction fees by more than 10 times with the current ideas, which include keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, and temporary state. Buterin said application developers will need to provide feedback.

Ethereum News also adds to the storage incentives as another research area. Buterin said a larger state size raises questions about who stores data. He added that saying each node stores 1% does not answer why they serve it.