Last week I posted about institutional RWA forecasts ranging from $2T to $16T by 2030. Most of those numbers assume Ethereum is the base layer everything gets built on.

On Friday Vitalik shared a Lean Ethereum roadmap that he says will reshape almost every major part of the protocol over the next three to four years. New proof system, new consensus design, new storage model, quantum safe cryptography, and privacy baked into the protocol from the start.
That is a lot of construction on a building people are already living in.
The direction makes sense. Instead of every node re-doing every transaction, they just verify a proof, which is how you scale to millions of validators without grinding to a halt. Quantum safety is one of those things nobody worries about until it's too late. And treating privacy as a core feature instead of an add-on is long overdue.
But here is the question nobody in the RWA conversation is asking. If you are a bank or asset manager planning to tokenize billions, do you start building on a foundation that just said it is replacing almost everything? Or do you wait until the work is done?
The Merge showed Ethereum can pull off huge upgrades without breaking things. That's the reason to trust the process. On the other hand, the Ethereum Foundation just cut roughly 20% of its staff and roughly 40% of its budget, and several researchers left to form Ethlabs. The team doing the hardest work is now smaller than it was six months ago.
For anyone building in RWA, the timing matters. The 2030 forecasts assume a finished product. Lean Ethereum suggests the product won't really be close to done until around 2029 to 2030. That either lines up perfectly with your rollout plans, or it's a reason to spread your bets across more than one chain.
Robinhood didn't wait. They launched their RWA chain on Arbitrum last week with 24/7 stock tokens and zero fee trading through Arcus. That's one answer to the question.