On July 6, Vitalik published "The Extremely Lean Chain," proposing to compress the state of a single validator to about 6 bytes in the Ethereum PoS consensus layer, with the goal of supporting up to millions of validators.

The core approach is to reduce the long-term storage of details such as public keys and withdrawal credentials on-chain, and instead have validators submit STARK zero-knowledge proofs daily, so that the chain only needs to verify these proofs and maintain a minimal state. This shifts the burden from "storing a bunch of data on-chain" to "generating a bunch of proofs off-chain."

The contrast is: the consensus layer becomes lighter, nodes become theoretically easier to run, but the daily operations and maintenance for validators become more complex, and they will rely more on the maturity and security of the ZK/STARK technology stack.

Currently, this is still a technical exploration, with no clear implementation timeline and lacking broad community feedback. Key variables going forward include whether the validator community is willing to take on this new responsibility of "proving every day," and whether this minimalist design can smoothly integrate with other Ethereum upgrade paths.