A terceira forma final do Ethereum está gradualmente tomando forma.

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

Ethereum research and development has been progressing rapidly recently. Since July 4, Vitalik Buterin has successively released an overview of Ethereum's long-term development roadmap, a new research paper on "Lean Chain," and a proposal to introduce a Bitcoin-like UTXO model to Ethereum.

Each of these research topics is highly worthy of discussion on its own, but when combined, they clearly outline the complete development contours of Ethereum's future.

The basis for this discussion is the Strawmap, a draft roadmap for underlying upgrades released by the Ethereum Foundation. This plan covers up to 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 rolled out over the next three to four years. However, there is no doubt that this is the third major iteration of Ethereum, on par with the second iteration—The Merge."

He further stated that during this transformation cycle, almost all core components of the network will be replaced with new solutions: from block verification logic and consensus mechanisms to the definition of the ledger's "state," everything will be restructured. Below, the core directions of change are summarized.

This draft roadmap is not final, but by combining multiple technical threads within the plan with Vitalik's perspectives, three core development directions can be distilled:

1. Verification Replaces Re-execution

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

2. Lightweight Transformation of Ethereum's Ledger

Ethereum will build a multi-tier ledger system: the existing flexible but storage-heavy dynamic ledger will be retained, but its growth will be strictly limited. At the same time, multiple new types of ledgers with lower storage costs and slightly less flexibility will be introduced and widely adopted. In an example, Vitalik envisions Ethereum's storage scale in 2030: the traditional dynamic ledger at around 2TB and the new lightweight ledger at 100TB. Projects and users are not forced to migrate to the new ledger, but economic costs will drive market choices—new ledgers can significantly reduce transaction fees.

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

Most current public blockchains have two major shortcomings: fully transparent ledgers and slow progress on quantum-resistant solutions. The Ethereum R&D team has elevated privacy interaction experiences and quantum-safe protection to core design standards, ensuring all new feature development revolves around these two points. Vitalik noted: "When designing frame transactions, transaction mempools, and state tree scaling solutions, we explicitly ask ourselves: how can non-intermediary, quantum-safe private transactions fit into this system, and what is the additional cost?"

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

It's exciting that various supporting technical proposals have been continuously and intensively released recently.

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

Operational logic: All ETH stakers generate a ZK proof daily, reporting their latest balance and submitting it on-chain. Ethereum will no longer directly maintain a complete balance ledger, only verifying the proofs. If a staker fails to submit a proof on a given day, they will temporarily stop participating in consensus voting until the proof is completed, without triggering a slashing mechanism.

Vitalik points out the core advantage of this solution: theoretically, it can support millions of validators in consensus, potentially paving the way for lowering the 32 ETH staking threshold. In addition, once fully implemented, validators could change their public keys and re-register daily, opening a technical path for anonymous staking.

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

The current Ethereum account model suffers from a persistent ledger bloat problem: once an address receives ETH or tokens, that record is permanently stored on all nodes, even if the address is used only once. As many transactions accumulate, 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, in the Ethereum version, there is no need to permanently store UTXO details; transaction records are stored in on-chain history and proofs can be generated as needed. The permanent ledger only keeps a single bit marker for each UTXO to indicate whether it has been spent.

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

Conclusion

If all these technical solutions are fully implemented, the Ethereum network will be more stable, sustainable, and flexible, truly achieving a long-term, future-proof architecture. Personally, I am most interested in the multiple types of lightweight ledgers and the changes they will bring to the application layer, fungible tokens, and the NFT ecosystem. Regardless of the timing of technical implementation, Ethereum's long-term development path is already very clear, and this is a positive long-term signal.