Vitalik: In the next 5 years, Ethereum will enter an era of streamlining, with quantum resistance and privacy becoming top priorities.

Odaily Planet Daily News: Vitalik Buterin said in a post on X that Ethereum researchers recently finalized the “Simplified Ethereum” roadmap at a conference in Berlin. This roadmap is not a one-time upgrade, but a series of forks lasting 3 to 4 years; starting from “I-star,” it will become Ethereum’s third major phase and will replace most core components. Key changes include moving verification from direct execution to recursive STARKs, introducing 1 to 2 rounds of finality in consensus, implementing multi-dimensional Gas pricing, and comprehensively replacing existing schemes with quantum-resistant cryptography.

Regarding the state model, the current dynamic state will be extended only to about 2TB, while introducing new scalable states such as UTXO and ring buffers, for a total scale of up to 100TB, applicable to ERC20, NFTs, and DeFi. After the rewrite, transaction fees can be reduced by more than 10 times; complex applications such as Uniswap pools will retain the old state and will not require mandatory migration. Privacy will be upgraded to a first-class design goal, and all new components must support quantum-resistant, intermediary-free private transactions. Formal verification will be rolled out comprehensively, and the introduction of RISC-V or leanISA as the protocol’s underlying VM will be explored; in the future, the EVM may become a compilation-layer feature.

Gas limits, Blob capacity, and block time will be increased multiple times over the next 5 years, with the Glasterdam fork being the first to raise the Gas limit. In terms of fork order, H-star Hegota will be the last “pre-simplified” fork, after which the simplified era begins.