The Next 10 Years of Ethereum in Vitalik’s Eyes

Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher

On July 5, 2026, Vitalik Buterin published a long post on X, unveiling a long-term roadmap called Lean Ethereum. Vitalik frames it as Ethereum’s third major evolution after the Merge: it is not a single standalone upgrade, but a series of protocol improvements that will roll 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 emerged amid a restructuring of the Ethereum organization, so it must be understood within a broader timeline. Interpreting this comprehensive overhaul requires not only clarifying the specific technical upgrades, but also seeing how its design reallocates trade-offs between “migration costs” and “verification thresholds,” and exploring how this underlying shift will ultimately transmit into ETH price performance.

Ethereum’s three development phases

To place this upgrade in context, you 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) every transaction. This model is safe, general, and open, but its scalability is therefore constrained.

• The second generation is PoS Ethereum after the 2022 “Merge.” This consensus-mechanism switch fundamentally changed Ethereum’s security model, issuance model, and staking system, and also demonstrated to the market that Ethereum has exceptional engineering capability to replace its core engine without downtime.

• The third generation is today’s Lean Ethereum. It no longer settles for the existing division of labor of “L1 handles settlement, L2 handles scaling,” but instead brings L1 performance, proved verification, privacy, post-quantum security, state structure, and client architecture all into a single long-term restructuring framework.

The origin of the Lean Ethereum roadmap

The Lean Ethereum roadmap was published on strawmap.org, a public draft first proposed earlier this February by Justin Drake, a Foundation researcher. It outlines seven network upgrades through 2029. The term strawmap comes from straw (straw), and the document positions itself as an editable draft. It also notes that it is a coordination tool still in progress, not a fixed schedule—any upgrade still requires research, testing, client implementation, and rough consensus.

In this vision, five long-term strategic goals are explicitly laid out: faster L1 finality (Finality), reaching an L1 throughput of 1 gigagas per second (in extreme conditions capable of supporting tens of thousands of TPS), L2 scaling with a teragas-level ecosystem vision, comprehensive quantum-cryptography security, and L1-native private transfers.

Comparing to the current situation makes it easy to feel how aggressive these goals are. According to Etherscan data, Ethereum L1 currently handles only about 32 transactions per second on average (about 2.7 million per day). Meanwhile, a 1 gigagas goal implies that L1’s compute capacity would see a breakthrough on the order of hundreds of times. Notably, on-chain demand on L1 has actually been in a growth channel over the past year: daily transaction volume rebounded sharply from about 1.4 million transactions in mid-2025, and since 2026 has spent most of the time stable in the 2.0 million to 2.9 million range, even briefly approaching 3.6 million during the market peaks in April and May. The release of this roadmap is precisely to address this recovering on-chain activity demand.

The timeline is also very clear. Hegotá, scheduled as the second upgrade in 2026, is likely to be Ethereum’s last “pre-Lean era” hard fork; after that, each upgrade theoretically falls within this restructuring. In the near term, the Glamsterdam upgrade is expected to bring a significant increase to the gas limit; that upgrade was originally expected to start in the first half of 2026 but has not launched yet.

The schedule is also one of the most concentrated discussion points after the roadmap was released. Dankrad Feist, a former core research staffer at the Ethereum Foundation and one of the proposers of the Ethereum Danksharding proposal, wrote on X saying he supports this strawmap, but that a three- to four-year timeline is too slow and that, with today’s large language model technology, the upgrade should be completed within a year.

Major core technical upgrades: proved verification and state restructuring

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

This choice also addresses another problem: STARK uses hash-based cryptography and, at present, there is no known quantum attack pathway, while Ethereum’s current signing scheme carries relevant risks. Vitalik says the priority for quantum security has been “significantly raised.” The roadmap plans to gradually replace all quantum-vulnerable components with Winternitz signatures; the most urgent piece is finding a quantum-secure design for the blobs that L2 relies on to keep fees low.

The consensus layer is also changing. In today’s Ethereum, transactions can be included on-chain in a dozen seconds, but finality takes about 15 minutes. The new design splits “a continuously producing chain” and “finality” into two separate things, aiming for validators to finalize after one to two rounds of voting—compressing 15 minutes to something close to real-time. There is also multi-dimensional gas pricing, meaning different resources like computation, storage, and data transmission are priced separately, like calculating water and electricity separately instead of mixing everything into one bill.

Changes to the state architecture directly affect application developers. State can be understood as Ethereum’s real-time ledger, recording every account’s balances and smart contract data. This ledger only gets thicker over time, and currently every full node must keep a complete copy, leading to high on-chain storage costs.

Vitalik’s plan is to structurally layer the storage architecture: the existing full-feature “Dynamic State (Dynamic State / core essence region)” will be strictly limited to a 2 TB hardware threshold to prevent unlimited growth; meanwhile, the protocol will open up a new “new type of state storage layer (a big warehouse)” with capacity up to 100 TB and greater extensibility. In Vitalik’s 2030 scenario, most tokens (ERC-20), NFTs, and conventional DeFi applications—if they are willing to rewrite contracts and move into this big warehouse using the new architecture—could see transaction fees drop by more than ten times. The protocol does not force or subsidize; it simply places the large price gap between the two layers there, leaving it to the market to decide when to migrate.

Privacy’s role is also being redefined. In the past, Ethereum’s division of labor was: everything is publicly transparent on-chain, and users who want privacy find third-party privacy protocols themselves. Vitalik wrote, “Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal,” meaning privacy shifts from something residents add on their own to a part of building standards: in the future, every new protocol component will be tested for one question during design—can it support privacy features that do not require intermediaries and are resistant to quantum attacks at low cost? Whether this can be achieved remains to be verified, but the evaluation criteria itself has already been written into the roadmap.

EVM replacement controversy: the L2 ecosystem game

The engine Ethereum has used for a decade is called EVM. The whole world’s contracts, developer tools, and programming languages were built around it. Now Vitalik proposes replacing this engine. The rationale is related to the STARK topic above: to generate mathematical proofs for transactions, running the cost in EVM is expensive—switching to an engine more friendly to proving would be much cheaper.

He names two candidate architectures: RISC-V and leanISA. The ideal end state is for the new engine to become the protocol’s core, with EVM relegated to a translation layer: old contracts can still run, but the underlying layer will first be translated into instructions the new engine understands before execution. Replacing the engine is more complex, so the proposal has sparked ongoing controversy since April 2025, when Vitalik first floated the RISC-V idea.

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

You can think of it this way: if L1 replaces its engine, it’s like redefining the “plug specifications” for the entire ecosystem. If your devices happen to use the same plug type, you can reuse them directly; if not, you’ll have to spend money to add an adapter. Whoever gets selected on the list determines which L2’s past investments will connect seamlessly to the future L1, and which L2 will have to pay the adapter cost.

Ethereum has no voting mechanism to settle such disagreements—whether to replace, and if so, with 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 developer meetings have reached no formal conclusion.

Will the roadmap affect the price of ETH?

Mapping a technical roadmap to ETH price gives two time horizons.

The first layer is the mechanism transmission path. Since EIP-1559, Ethereum destroys the base fee of each transaction. Therefore, 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 improvements, gas consumption and the amount destroyed would amplify in sync—this is the most direct transmission path between the roadmap and ETH pricing. It should be emphasized, however, that this path requires the premise that “demand comes back after capacity increases.” Capacity itself does not automatically create demand.

The second layer is the time lag. The roadmap is a three- to four-year phased engineering plan. Within 2026, this roadmap will not change any current realities of Ethereum. It is a directional commitment, and Ethereum’s directional commitments have a record of delays on the schedule—Merge itself was delayed by several years compared with early estimates. In other words, this roadmap increases Ethereum’s long-term capacity upper bound but does not address the problem of capturing ETH’s mid-term value; the criticism by analyst Ignas points directly at this—it does not cover token-economic adjustments for ETH itself.

Watchlist for the next decade

Once you pull everything together, the final answer points to a single structure: this strawmap raises Ethereum’s long-term ceiling, but it does not immediately solve the mid-term value capture problem for ETH. This is not the moment to chase FOMO based on the roadmap.

Rather than trying to price 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 launch smoothly and complete the 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 into L1 via blob payments and settlement demand

• Whether ETH’s relative performance versus BTC can recover

Each of these indicators corresponds to a part of the roadmap and can be validated week by week on publicly available dashboards such as Etherscan chart pages and DefiLlama. Any change in any one indicator is closer to a pricing basis than the roadmap document itself. Any change will tell the market earlier than the roadmap document itself whether this three- to four-year restructuring is delivering—or being delayed.