Ethereum's third ultimate form is gradually taking shape.

Author: William M. Peaster Source: Bankless Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

Ethereum's recent research and development progress has been advancing rapidly. Since July 4, Vitalik Buterin has successively released a comprehensive overview of Ethereum's long-term development roadmap, a new research paper titled "The Splurge Chain," and a proposal to introduce a Bitcoin-style UTXO model to Ethereum.

Each of the above studies is highly valuable for discussion on its own, and when combined, they clearly outline the complete development trajectory of Ethereum's future.

The foundation of this discussion is the Strawmap, a draft roadmap for underlying upgrades released by the Ethereum Foundation, which covers the period until the end of 2029 and was updated at the end of June. On July 4, Vitalik published an article interpreting the core changes of the roadmap:

"Lean Ethereum is not a one-time hard fork upgrade but a series of improvements implemented in batches over the next three to four years. But there is no doubt that this is the third major iteration of Ethereum, equivalent in status to the second iteration — The Merge."

He further stated that during this transformation cycle, almost all core components of the network will be replaced by new solutions: from block validation logic and consensus mechanism to the definition of the ledger's "state," all will be reconstructed. The core transformation directions are outlined below.

This draft roadmap is not finalized, but based on the multiple technical threads in the plan and Vitalik's views, three core development directions can be distilled:

1. Verification Replaces Re-execution

Currently, Ethereum full nodes need to re-execute every transaction to verify the on-chain computation logic. In the Lean era, nodes will directly verify cryptographic proofs (recursive STARKs). This solution will significantly reduce the cost of proof generation, further scale the execution layer, lower the hardware requirements for nodes, and unlock more optimization opportunities.

2. Lightweight Transformation of Ethereum Ledger

Ethereum will build a multi-tier ledger system: the existing flexible but storage-intensive dynamic ledger will be retained but strictly limited in capacity; at the same time, several new types of ledgers with lower storage costs and slightly less flexibility will be introduced and widely adopted. Vitalik gave an example envisioning Ethereum's storage scale in 2030: traditional dynamic ledger about 2TB, new lightweight ledger up to 100TB. Projects and users are not forced to migrate to the new ledger, but economic costs will drive market choice — new ledgers can significantly reduce transaction fees.

3. Privacy Protection and Quantum-Resistant Algorithms as Top-Level Design Principles

Most current public chains have two major shortcomings: completely transparent ledgers and slow progress on quantum-resistant solutions. Ethereum's R&D team has elevated privacy interaction experience and quantum security protection to core design standards, and all new feature development must be implemented around these two points. Vitalik mentioned: "When we design frame transactions, transaction mempools, and state tree scaling solutions, we clearly ask ourselves: how can private, quantum-safe, and intermediary-free transactions be compatible with this system, and what is the additional overhead?"

The above technological innovations will not be implemented all at once like The Merge but will be rolled out in stages through 6 to 7 hard forks before 2029. The Ethereum Foundation also clarified that Strawmap is only a reference framework for coordinating R&D progress, not an immutable plan.

It is worth looking forward to the continuous and intensive output of various supporting technical proposals recently.

Currently, the Beacon Chain needs to retain complete records for each validator, updating all validator balances in batches each settlement period, resulting in huge storage overhead. The transformation plan proposed by Vitalik compresses the storage per validator from the current 121 bytes to about 6 bytes, a reduction of 95%.

Operational logic: All ETH stakers generate a ZK proof daily, report the latest balance, and submit it on-chain. Ethereum no longer directly maintains a complete balance ledger; it only verifies the proofs. If a staker fails to submit a proof for the day, they will be suspended from participating in consensus voting until the proof is submitted, but no slashing penalty is triggered.

Vitalik pointed out the core advantage of this solution: theoretically, it can support millions of validators participating in consensus, potentially paving the way for lowering the 32 ETH staking threshold. In addition, after full implementation, validators can change their public key and re-register daily, opening up the technical path for anonymous staking.

Another proposal that will profoundly change Ethereum's architecture has just been released, with the core idea of borrowing from Bitcoin's transaction model.

The current Ethereum account model suffers from chronic ledger bloat: once an address receives ETH or tokens, the record is permanently stored on all nodes, even if the address is used only once. With a massive number of transactions, the ledger data expands indefinitely.

Wahrstätter proposes introducing Bitcoin's Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model: UTXOs are one-time value units that are destroyed when spent. Furthermore, the Ethereum version does not need to permanently store UTXO details; transaction records are stored in on-chain history, and proofs can be generated on demand; the permanent ledger only retains a 1-bit marker for each UTXO to indicate whether it has been spent.

Calculations show that the permanent ledger storage for payment transactions can be reduced by 99.8%. Combined with frame transactions, the new transaction model allows new addresses to send and receive assets without needing to pre-hold ETH to pay gas, paving the way for native stealth addresses at layer 1.

Summary

If all the above technical solutions are implemented, the Ethereum network will be more stable, sustainable, and flexible, truly achieving a future-proof long-term architecture. I am personally most interested in multiple types of lightweight ledgers and their impact on the application layer, fungible tokens, and NFT ecosystems. Regardless of the timeline for technical implementation, Ethereum's long-term development path is already very clear, and it is positive for the medium to long term.