Ethereum's long-term strategy became much more apparent after researchers convened in Berlin, building on earlier conversations with client teams in Svalbard. The network is heading toward "Lean Ethereum," a multi-year transformation anticipated to unfold over the next three to four years, rather than executing another discrete update.

The goal is to replace important protocol components while, whenever possible, maintaining compatibility with current applications, going well beyond small tweaks. Ethereum is preparing for what could be its third significant update since the Merge, which includes new state models, enhanced privacy, and improved client design, in addition to recursive STARK verification and quantum-resistant encryption.

• Lean Ethereum Will Replace Nearly Every Core Layer of the Protocol
• Privacy, Formal Verification & New Virtual Machines Become Core Priorities
• Ethereum's New State Model Targets Massive Scale
• Scaling Roadmap, Storage Incentives & the Road Beyond H-Star

Lean Ethereum Will Replace Nearly Every Core Layer of the Protocol

Lean Ethereum is a long-term architectural change rather than a single hard split, according to Ethereum researchers. Lean Ethereum is anticipated to replace the majority of the protocol's essential building blocks in the upcoming years, just as the Merge drastically altered Ethereum's consensus process.

The shift in transaction verification from direct execution to recursive STARK proofs is one of the most significant developments. Recursive STARKs will become an established, first-class protocol component responsible for far more efficient computation verification, rather than each validator continually running transactions.

Additionally, quantum security has grown in importance. Every protocol component now vulnerable to future quantum attacks is scheduled to be replaced with quantum-safe equivalents. Numerous research initiatives, including the pressing creation of a quantum-safe design for Ethereum blobs, have been expedited by this change.

Redesigning consensus itself is also underway. While introducing one or two-round finality, researchers are attempting to distinguish between chain availability and finality. The goal is to develop a consensus process that is both much faster and easier to deploy than current methods while providing theoretically optimal security.

Alongside these protocol upgrades, Ethereum will also introduce multidimensional gas accounting, redesign portions of its state architecture, modernise client implementations, and simplify many protocol components. According to researchers, the transition is intended to minimise disruption for existing decentralised applications, much like the successful transition achieved during the Merge.

Privacy, Formal Verification & New Virtual Machines Become Core Priorities

Instead of treating privacy as an optional feature, Ethereum's future design philosophy now views it as a key protocol priority. Every significant protocol element, such as Frames, the mempool, and state tree additions, is now assessed with privacy-first concerns in mind, according to researchers.

Ensuring that quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocols can function well without adding undue computational burden is the aim. As a result, privacy is no longer only an application-level concern but is now integrated into Ethereum's core architecture.

Additionally, formal verification has taken centre stage in protocol development. In order to lower implementation risks and increase confidence in upcoming upgrades, researchers want crucial protocol components to be mathematically verified for security.

This stronger reliance on formal verification also makes protocol canonicalization more practical. Parts of Ethereum can now be directly defined through standardised bytecode implementations. The ongoing development of evm-asm is intended to become a canonical proof system for the Ethereum Virtual Machine, providing stronger guarantees around correctness and security.

At the same time, Ethereum researchers increasingly believe the protocol will eventually require another virtual machine alongside the EVM. Current leading candidates include leanISA and RISC-V. Initially, such a virtual machine would primarily support recursive STARK proving, but exposing it directly to developers could unlock programmable privacy and improved scalability. A longer-term vision even suggests the EVM could eventually function as a compiler-level feature while the protocol itself executes directly on RISC-V or leanISA.

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.

The updated strawmap is at https://t.co/HZEerH1xxI, and I attached a picture of it to this post.

My… pic.twitter.com/KPGayHSySf

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 4, 2026

Ethereum's New State Model Targets Massive Scale

Among all proposed upgrades, researchers identified Ethereum's state redesign as potentially the most disruptive.

Instead of replacing today's dynamic state entirely, the current direction is to preserve it while scaling it only moderately. Alongside it, Ethereum would introduce entirely new state types designed specifically for much larger scalability.

Researchers illustrated a possible 2030 scenario where Ethereum maintains roughly 2 TB of traditional dynamic state while supporting around 100 TB of new scalable state. Unlike today's design, these newer state models would not require builders to synchronise or permanently store every piece of data, making significantly larger state sizes practical.

ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, and several DeFi applications are anticipated to benefit greatly from these scalable state models. However, because they rely on more flexible storage patterns, highly centralised contracts like Uniswap pools, on-chain order books, and other similarly complicated applications would probably continue to employ traditional dynamic state.

Crucially, the migration of existing apps would not be mandatory. However, by restructuring apps to make use of the more recent storage formats, developers could realise significant efficiency gains. Transaction fees might be reduced by more than 10 times by switching from ERC-20 implementations to new UTXO-based storage designs, according to researchers.

Scaling Roadmap, Storage Incentives & the Road Beyond H-Star

H-Star, also known as Hegota, is now anticipated by researchers to be Ethereum's last significant update before the Lean Ethereum era officially starts. Future protocol updates, beginning with I-Star, are anticipated to continuously mirror Lean Ethereum's more general design philosophy.

Over the course of the next five years or more, scaling itself will continue through frequent increases in the gas limit, blob capacity expansions, and shorter slot periods. With the Glmasterdam project, a large rise in the gas limit is already expected. Only once adequate client optimisations and protocol enhancements show that increased throughput can be attained safely will each scaling milestone be implemented.

As Ethereum's total state expands significantly, researchers also highlighted storage incentives as a completely new research topic. It is no longer thought to be adequate to just distribute data among nodes, such as having each node store only 1% of the overall state. Instead, researchers are concentrating on the financial incentives that encourage users to retain data permanently while consistently providing it to the network, making the sustainability of decentralised storage a top-notch research issue.

Ethereum intends to simultaneously improve scalability, bolster security, streamline protocol architecture, integrate privacy directly into the network, get ready for quantum-resistant cryptography, and lay the technical groundwork for the protocol's next 10 years of development. This is reflected in the overall roadmap.

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