What exactly does this round of "minimalist transformation" by Vitalik aim to solve?

Author: William M. Peaster | Compiled by:白话区块链

The Ethereum research circle has been firing on all cylinders lately. From July 4 onward, Vitalik Buterin first revisited Ethereum's long-term direction, then released a new "Extremely Lean Chain" research post, and specifically highlighted a proposal to bring Bitcoin-style UTXOs to Ethereum.

These moves are interesting on their own, but putting them together gives a clearer picture of what Ethereum is evolving into.

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin, continuing discussions from April in Svalbard with client teams to plan the protocol's long-term evolution roadmap. The updated strawmap has been released, and I've attached the image in this post. — vitalik.eth, July 4, 2026

The background here is the so-called strawmap, which the Ethereum Foundation calls a "draft roadmap" — a sketch of L1 upgrades covering through the end of this decade, updated in late June. Then on July 4, Vitalik gave his own summary of these changes:

"Lean Ethereum is not a one-time single upgrade, but a set of improvements that will roll out to the Ethereum network over the next three to four years. But don't get it wrong — it is indeed the third major iteration of Ethereum, just as the Merge was the second."

He went on to say that along this evolutionary arc, nearly all major components of the network will be replaced: how blocks are validated, how consensus is reached, and even what "state" itself means. So what exactly will happen next?

Of course, the strawmap is not a single linear narrative. But from these main trends, combined with Vitalik's comments, we can already summarize several major themes. For example:

Verification is replacing re-execution — Currently, every Ethereum node re-executes every transaction to check whether the computation on-chain is correct. In the Lean era, nodes will instead check cryptographic proofs, i.e., recursive STARKs. This change makes "proving correctness" itself cheaper, further driving execution scaling, lowering hardware requirements, and leaving room for more subsequent optimizations.

Ethereum is starting to "diet on state" — A multi-tier state system is taking shape. The current flexible but heavier "dynamic" state will remain, but its future growth will be limited. In contrast, newly emerging state types will be cheaper, slightly less flexible, yet more aggressively expanded. Vitalik gave a hypothetical 2030 Ethereum: the former around 2 TB, the latter possibly expanding to 100 TB. Migrating to these new state types won't be mandatory, but economic incentives will work because they will bring significantly lower fees for projects and users.

Privacy and post-quantum become design pillars — While most public chains are still 1) fully transparent, and 2) slow on post-quantum solutions, Ethereum researchers have elevated privacy experience and quantum defense to core design principles that must be considered upfront and built around. As Vitalik said: "When designing Frames, mempool, and new state tree additions, we will explicitly ask: 'How would a quantum-safe, intermediary-independent privacy protocol transaction run through this system? What is its cost?'"

These advancements won't land in a single upgrade like the Merge, but will be spread across 6 to 7 forks between now and 2029. Of course, it's called a strawmap precisely because it's just a rough roadmap; the Ethereum Foundation has always stressed that this timeline and route are more for coordination reference than a finalized construction blueprint.

But excitingly, new mechanism proposals are now appearing almost daily.

A typical example right now: This morning, Vitalik released "The Extremely Lean Chain," a design proposal aimed at compressing Ethereum's consensus layer to near-minimal extreme simplicity.

In the current Ethereum architecture, the Beacon Chain needs to keep a fairly bloated record for each validator, and process balance updates for all validators every epoch. In Vitalik's proposed evolution, the data saved on-chain per validator would be approximately 6 bytes, compared to today's roughly 121 bytes — a 95% reduction.

The mechanism works like this: Every day, each ETH staker generates a ZK proof proving their updated balance, and submits it on-chain. In this way, Ethereum essentially shifts from "doing the accounting itself" to "checking receipts." If a staker misses a day's proof submission, they simply temporarily cannot participate in attestation, and can resume once they catch up — no slashing involved.

As Vitalik says, the biggest advantage of this path is that it "could allow consensus to scale to millions of validators if necessary." Could this become the basis for lowering the 32 ETH staking threshold in the future? We'll see. But this design also has other benefits, such as in its full form, validators could even re-register with a new public key every day — paving the way for anonymous staking.

However, Vitalik's "Extremely Lean" proposal is only one of the directions worth watching now. Another mechanism draft that could also have a huge impact on Ethereum was just released by Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter, titled "Native UTXOs on Ethereum."

What if we directly borrow Bitcoin's transaction model? That's the core of this proposal. On Ethereum today, receiving a payment leaves a permanent record. When an address first holds ETH or some token, every node must store that state item forever — even if the address is only used once. Multiply that pattern by billions of payments, and the state bloat crisis becomes a real problem.

Wahrstätter's idea is to move to Bitcoin-style UTXOs, i.e., "unspent transaction outputs" — essentially one-time value packages that are consumed when spent. Going further, in the Ethereum version, the chain does not even need to store the UTXOs themselves. Their details can remain in the chain's historical data, proved when needed; the chain's permanent state only needs to keep one bit per UTXO to mark whether it has been spent.

According to Wahrstätter's calculations, this shift would reduce permanent state related to payment flows by about 99.8%. Combined with innovations like frame transactions, this new transaction method would also allow newly created addresses to receive and then spend funds without holding ETH for gas themselves, paving the way for smoother stealth address experiences on L1.

Stepping back: if concepts like these eventually land on Ethereum, the network will become healthier, more durable, more flexible, and closer to that future-facing north star. Personally, what I'm most interested in are these new state types and how they will affect the application layer, fungible tokens, and NFT experiments.

But no matter what the next step is or when it arrives, Ethereum's direction has never been clearer than now. That's bullish.