Vitalik’s vision for Ethereum’s next 10 years

Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher

On July 5, 2026, Vitalik Buterin published a long post on X, unveiling a long-term roadmap named Lean Ethereum. Vitalik positions it as the third major evolution of Ethereum after the Merge. It is not a single upgrade, but a series of protocol improvements rolled out in stages over the next three to four years, covering almost every core module of the protocol—from verification methods, cryptography, and finality to state storage, all being rebuilt.

This roadmap was born amid a restructuring of the Ethereum organization, so it must be understood within a broader timeline. Interpreting this comprehensive rebuild is not only about clarifying the specific technical upgrades, but also about seeing how its design redistributes trade-offs between “migration costs” and “verification thresholds,” and exploring how this underlying transformation ultimately feeds through to ETH price performance.

Ethereum’s three development phases

To position this upgrade, we can first map out Ethereum’s three generations:

The first generation is the original architecture of “PoW + EVM,” whose core is that all nodes directly re-execute (Re-execution) all transactions. While this model is secure, general, and open, its scalability is therefore limited.

The second generation is PoS Ethereum after the 2022 Merge. This consensus mechanism shift fundamentally changes Ethereum’s security model, issuance model, and staking system, while also demonstrating to the market that Ethereum has extremely strong engineering capability to swap out a core engine without shutting down.

The third generation is today’s Lean Ethereum. It no longer satisfies the existing division of labor of “L1 handles settlement, L2 handles scalability,” but instead brings L1 performance, proved verification, privacy, post-quantum security, state structure, and client architecture into the same long-term rebuilding framework.

The origin of the Lean Ethereum roadmap

The Lean Ethereum roadmap was published on strawmap.org. It was first proposed in February this year by Justin Drake, a foundation researcher, as a public draft planning seven network upgrades up to 2029. The term strawmap is derived from straw (straw), and the document frames itself as a modifiable draft. strawmap also notes that it is an ongoing coordination tool rather than a locked schedule; any upgrade still requires research, testing, client implementation, and a rough consensus.

In this vision, five long-term strategic goals are explicitly outlined: faster L1 finality, reaching L1 throughput of 1 gigagas per second (in extreme states, capable of supporting ten-thousand-level TPS), L2 scaling envisioned at teragas scale, fully defensive post-quantum cryptography security, and native privacy-preserving transfers on L1.

Compared with the current state, you can feel how aggressive these goals are. According to Etherscan data, Ethereum L1 currently processes only about 32 transactions per second on average (about 2.7 million per day). Meanwhile, the 1 gigagas target implies that L1’s computational capacity will experience a many-hundred-fold surge. Notably, on-chain demand for L1 has actually been in a growth channel over the past year: daily transactions rebounded sharply from 1.4 million in mid-2025 to stabilize most of the time between 2.0 million and 2.9 million since 2026, and during the market peaks in April and May it even briefly approached 3.6 million. The release of this roadmap is precisely intended to address this wave of recovering on-chain activity demand.

The timeline marks are also very clear. Hegotá, scheduled as the second upgrade in 2026, is likely Ethereum’s last hard fork “before the Lean era.” After that, in theory, every upgrade belongs to this rebuilding. The closer Glamsterdam upgrade is expected to bring a significant gas limit increase; that upgrade was originally expected to start in the first half of 2026, but has not gone live yet.

The timetable is also one of the most discussed points after the roadmap was published. Dankrad Feist, a former core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and one of the proposers of the Ethereum Danksharding方案, wrote on X that he supports this strawmap, but that the three- to four-year schedule is simply too slow—given current large language model technology, the upgrade should be completed within a year.

Major core technical upgrade: proved verification and state reconstruction

The technical core of Lean Ethereum is to fundamentally change the verification mode. Today, Ethereum’s security model relies on each node re-executing every transaction to confirm that the state is correct. The new design instead incorporates recursive STARK proofs as a native core protocol component: a prover performs the heavy computation, while all other nodes only need to verify a streamlined mathematical proof.

This choice also addresses another issue. STARK uses hash-based cryptography, and there are currently no known quantum attack paths. Ethereum’s existing signing scheme carries related risks. Vitalik says the priority of quantum security has been raised “significantly,” and the roadmap plans to gradually replace all quantum-vulnerable components with Winternitz signatures. The most urgent piece is to find a quantum-secure design for the blob that L2 relies on to lower fees.

The consensus layer is also being changed. In today’s Ethereum, transactions are included on-chain in just about a dozen seconds, but finality takes roughly fifteen minutes. The new design separates “the chain that keeps producing blocks” from “finality,” with the goal that a verifier voting for one to two rounds can finalize the result, compressing the fifteen minutes to something close to real time. There are also multi-dimensional gas pricing—meaning different resources such as computation, storage, and data transmission are priced separately, like water bills and electricity bills are calculated separately rather than everything being mixed into one bill.

The changes to the state architecture directly involve application developers. State can be understood as Ethereum’s real-time ledger, recording all accounts’ balances and smart contract data. This ledger only grows thicker over time, and currently every full node must maintain a complete copy of it, keeping on-chain storage costs high.

Vitalik’s proposal is to structurally layer the storage architecture. The existing full-feature “Dynamic State (Dynamic State / core essence area)” will be strictly limited to a hardware threshold of 2 TB to prevent unbounded expansion. Meanwhile, the protocol will also open up a new “new state storage layer (a big repository)” with a capacity of up to 100 TB, offering greater extensibility. In Vitalik’s 2030 vision, most tokens (ERC-20), NFTs, and conventional DeFi applications could see transaction fees drop by more than ten times, as long as they are willing to rewrite contracts and move into this big repository using the new architecture. The protocol does not force or subsidize migration; it simply places the huge price gap between the two layers there for the market applications to decide when to migrate.

Privacy’s position is also redefined. In the past, Ethereum’s division of labor was: everything on-chain is公开透明 (public and transparent), and users who want privacy have to find third-party privacy protocols themselves. Vitalik writes: Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal, meaning privacy shifts from “users adding it themselves” to “part of the building standards.” In the future, every new protocol component will be tested at the design stage for one key question: whether it can support privacy functions that do not require intermediaries and are quantum-resistant at low cost. Whether it can be done remains to be verified, but the evaluation criteria themselves are already written into the roadmap.

The EVM replacement controversy: the battle for the L2 ecosystem

For a decade, Ethereum’s engine has been called EVM. The world’s contracts, development tools, and programming languages have all been built around it. Now Vitalik proposes replacing this engine, and the rationale is related to the STARK points above: to help generate mathematical proofs for transactions, running EVM is expensive; switching to an engine more friendly to proofs would be much cheaper.

He names two candidate architectures: RISC-V and leanISA. The ideal endgame is for the new engine to become the protocol itself, with the EVM relegated to a translation layer: old contracts can still run, but their underlying execution would first be translated into instructions the new engine understands. Changing the engine is more complex, so since Vitalik first floated the RISC-V concept in April 2025, this proposal has continued to trigger debate.

Offchain Labs, the core developer behind L2 Arbitrum, publicly argued last November that WebAssembly (WASM) is the better choice, but WASM is not included in Vitalik’s candidate list this time. Why does this matter? Because Arbitrum is one of Ethereum’s largest L2s, and its contract technology Stylus is built on WASM.

You can understand it this way: if L1 changes its engine, it’s like redefining the “plug specifications” for the whole ecosystem. If your devices happen to use the same plug type, you can reuse them directly; if not, you have to pay for your own adapters. Whoever is chosen determines which L2s’ past investments can connect seamlessly to the future L1, and which L2s will have to pay migration adapter costs.

Ethereum does not have a voting mechanism to resolve this kind of disagreement—whether to change it, and to what. Ultimately it depends on the rough consensus among developers at the All Core Devs meeting, as well as whether each client team is willing to implement it. As of now, replacing the engine remains a long-term goal in Vitalik’s words, and the developers’ meeting has reached no formal conclusion.

Will the roadmap affect the ETH price?

Translating the technical roadmap into ETH pricing yields two time layers.

The first layer is the mechanism transmission path. Since EIP-1559, the base fee of each transaction is burned, so the scale of L1 transaction activity directly affects ETH’s supply dynamics and settlement value. Under this mechanism, if the gigagas target is achieved and L1 transaction volume rebounds with throughput, gas consumption and the amount burned would increase in sync—this is the most direct transmission path between the roadmap and ETH pricing. It’s important to emphasize that this path depends on the premise that “demand returns after capacity increases”; capacity itself does not automatically create demand.

The second layer is the time gap. The roadmap is a three- to four-year phased engineering plan, and within 2026 this roadmap will not change any current state of Ethereum; it is a directional commitment. Ethereum’s directional commitments have a track record of being delayed on the schedule—Merge itself arrived years later than earlier estimates. In other words, this roadmap increases Ethereum’s long-term capacity ceiling, but it does not address the mid-term value-capture issue for ETH; that is exactly what analyst Ignas’s criticism of the roadmap is pointing to—it does not cover token-economic adjustments for ETH itself.

A checklist to watch over the next decade

After consolidating the above, the ultimate answer points to the same structure: this strawmap raises Ethereum’s long-term ceiling, but it has not immediately resolved the ETH mid-term value-capture issue, and we are not at a FOMO timing point “priced off the roadmap.”

Rather than pricing the roadmap itself, a more actionable approach is to track a few nodes that can be tested in the near term:

Whether the Glamsterdam upgrade can start smoothly and complete a gas limit increase

Whether blob demand can keep growing along with L2 activity

Whether L1 fee revenue and ETH burn amount can improve

Whether L2 growth can feed back to L1 via blob payments and settlement demand

Whether the relative performance of ETH versus BTC can be restored

Each of these indicators corresponds to a piece of the roadmap, and they can be validated week by week on public dashboards like Etherscan’s chart pages and DefiLlama. Any change in these indicators is closer to a pricing basis than the roadmap document itself. Any change will inform the market earlier than the roadmap document itself, answering whether this three- to four-year rebuild is兑现 (delivering) or is being delayed.