Vitalik: Ethereum will complete its third major iteration in the next five years, with quantum resistance and privacy becoming top-tier goals.

Gold Finance reported that on July 5, Vitalik Buterin stated that Ethereum researchers recently finalized the "Ethereum Purge" roadmap during a meeting in Berlin. This is not a single upgrade but a series of forks over 3 to 4 years (starting with "I-star"), which will become Ethereum's third major era, akin to "The Merge," replacing almost all core components.

Core changes include: verification shifting from direct execution to recursive STARKs; consensus introducing 1-2 rounds of finality for faster and more secure outcomes; multidimensional gas pricing; and a comprehensive replacement of existing cryptographic schemes with post-quantum cryptography. The most disruptive change is the state model — the current dynamic state will only expand to about 2 TB, while introducing new scalable state types such as UTXO and ring buffers, with a total capacity of up to 100 TB, suitable for ERC20/NFT/DeFi. After rewriting, transaction fees could decrease by more than 10 times. Complex applications (e.g., Uniswap pools) will retain the old state without mandatory migration. However, who stores the hundreds of terabytes of state and the incentive issues around this become new key research directions.

Privacy is elevated to a first-class design goal; all new components must support post-quantum, intermediary-free private transactions. Formal verification will be fully implemented, and the introduction of RISC-V or leanISA as the protocol's underlying VM will be explored, with the EVM potentially retreating to a compile-layer feature.

In terms of scaling metrics, gas limits, blob capacity, and block times will be increased multiple times over the next five years. The Glasterdam fork will first significantly raise the gas limit. Regarding the fork sequence, H-star (Hegota) will be the last "pre-purge" fork, after which the purge era fully begins.

Through this complex but smooth transition, Ethereum is moving toward a new network that is post-quantum, massively scalable, and privacy-first, while ensuring minimal impact on existing applications. This five-year careful disruption has officially begun.