The next 10 years of Ethereum in Vitalik’s eyes

On July 5, 2026, Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy article on X, announcing a long-term roadmap called Lean Ethereum. Vitalik positioned it as Ethereum's third major evolution after Merge: it's not a single upgrade, but a series of protocol improvements implemented in phases over the next three to four years, covering almost every core module of the protocol, from verification methods, cryptography, finality to state storage—a complete overhaul. This roadmap, born during Ethereum's organizational restructuring, must be understood within a more complete timeline. Interpreting this comprehensive restructuring requires not only clarifying the specific technical upgrades but also understanding how its design redistributes trade-offs between "migration costs" and "verification thresholds," and exploring how this underlying transformation will ultimately impact ETH's price performance. Three Stages of Ethereum's Development To position this upgrade, we can first outline Ethereum's three generations: The first generation was the original "PoW + EVM" architecture, the core of which was that all nodes directly re-executed all transactions. While this model was secure, universal, and open, its scalability was also limited. The second generation is the PoS Ethereum that emerged after the "Merge" in 2022. This shift in consensus mechanism completely changed Ethereum's security model, issuance model, and staking system, while also demonstrating to the market Ethereum's exceptional engineering capabilities to replace its core engine without downtime. The third generation is the current Lean Ethereum. It no longer adheres to the existing division of labor where "L1 handles settlement and L2 handles scaling," but instead incorporates L1 performance, proven verification, privacy, quantum resistance, state structure, and client architecture all into a single long-term restructuring framework. The Lean Ethereum roadmap, published on strawmap.org, is a public draft first proposed by Foundation researcher Justin Drake in February of this year, outlining seven network upgrades up to 2029. The name "strawmap" is derived from "straw," and the document positions itself as a modifiable draft. Strawmap also notes that it is an ongoing coordination tool, not a locked timeline; any upgrade still requires research, testing, client implementation, and rough consensus. This vision clearly outlines five long-term strategic goals: faster L1 finality, L1 throughput of 1 gigagas per second (capable of handling tens of thousands of TPS in extreme conditions), L2 scaling with a teragas-level ecosystem vision, comprehensive quantum cryptographic security, and L1-native privacy-preserving transactions. Comparing these goals to the current situation reveals their radical nature.According to Etherscan data, Ethereum L1 currently processes an average of only about 32 transactions per second (approximately 2.7 million transactions per day); the target of 1 gigagas implies a several-hundred-fold increase in L1 computing capacity. It's worth noting that on-chain demand for L1 has actually been on a growth trajectory over the past year: daily transaction volume rebounded sharply from 1.4 million in mid-2025, and has remained stable between 2 million and 2.9 million for most of 2026, even approaching 3.6 million during the market peak in April and May. This roadmap is designed to address this recovering demand for on-chain activity. The timeline is also clearly defined: Hegotá, currently scheduled as the second upgrade in 2026, is likely the last hard fork in Ethereum's "pre-Lean era," and every subsequent upgrade will theoretically be part of this refactoring. The more recent Glamsterdam upgrade is expected to bring a substantial increase in the gas cap; this upgrade was originally anticipated to launch in the first half of 2026 but has not yet been implemented. The timeline has been one of the most discussed topics since the roadmap was announced. Dankrad Feist, a former core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and the proposer of the Ethereum Danksharding solution, wrote on X that he approves of the roadmap, but a three-to-four-year timeline is too slow. He believes the upgrade should be completed within a year using current large language model technology. The core technology of Lean Ethereum is to fundamentally change the verification model. Currently, Ethereum's security model requires each node to re-execute every transaction to confirm the correctness of the state. The new design incorporates recursive STARK proofs into the protocol's native core component: a single prover performs the heavy computation, while all other nodes only need to verify a concise mathematical proof. This choice also addresses another issue: STARK uses hash cryptography, and there are currently no known quantum attack paths, while Ethereum's current signature scheme carries related risks. Vitalik stated that quantum security has been "significantly prioritized," and the roadmap plans to gradually replace all quantum-fragile components with Winternitz signatures. The most urgent task is to find a quantum-safe design for blobs, which L2 relies on to reduce fees. The consensus layer is also within the scope of the changes. Currently, in Ethereum, transactions are recorded on-chain in just over ten seconds, but final confirmation takes about fifteen minutes. The new design separates "continuously producing blocks" and "finality" into two separate processes, aiming to finalize decisions in one or two rounds of validator voting, compressing the fifteen-minute process to near real-time. Additionally, there's multi-dimensional gas pricing, meaning that different resources such as computation, storage, and data transmission are priced separately, like water and electricity bills are calculated separately, rather than all combined into one bill.The changes to the state architecture directly impact application developers. State can be understood as Ethereum's real-time ledger, recording the balances of all accounts and smart contract data. This ledger only grows thicker over time, and currently, all nodes must maintain a complete copy, leading to persistently high on-chain storage costs. Vitalik's solution is to structurally layer the storage architecture: the existing fully functional "Dynamic State (Core Essence Area)" will be strictly limited to a 2 TB hardware threshold to prevent unlimited expansion; simultaneously, the protocol will create a new, more scalable "new state storage layer (large repository)" with a capacity of up to 100 TB. In Vitalik's vision for 2030, most tokens (ERC-20), NFTs, and regular DeFi applications, if willing to rewrite their contracts and move into this large repository using the new architecture, could see transaction fees drop by more than tenfold. The protocol layer will not force or subsidize this; it will simply present the huge price difference between the two layers, allowing market applications to decide when to migrate. The status of privacy is also redefined. In the past, Ethereum's division of labor was: everything on-chain was open and transparent, and users who wanted privacy had to find their own third-party privacy protocols. Vitalik's recent statement, "Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first-class goal," means that privacy has moved from being "added by the resident" to being "part of the building code." Every new component of the future protocol will be tested during the design phase to determine if it can support man-in-the-middle and quantum-resistant privacy features at low cost. Whether this is achievable remains to be seen, but the evaluation criteria are already included in the roadmap. For the past ten years, Ethereum has used the EVM engine, around which contracts, development tools, and programming languages worldwide are built. Now, Vitalik proposes replacing this engine, citing reasons related to the previous STARK: generating mathematical proofs for transactions using the EVM is very costly, and switching to a more proof-friendly engine would be much cheaper. He named RISC-V and leanISA as candidates, with the ideal outcome being that the new engine becomes the protocol body, and the EVM relegated to a translation layer: old contracts can still run, but the underlying code is first translated into instructions that the new engine can understand before execution. Changing the engine is relatively more complex, so this proposal has been controversial since Vitalik first proposed the RISC-V concept in April 2025. Offchain Labs, the core developer behind L2 Arbitrum, publicly argued last November that WebAssembly (WASM) was a better choice, but WASM was not on Vitalik's list of candidates. Why is this important?Arbitrum is one of Ethereum's largest L2 blockchains, and its contract technology, Stylus, is built on WASM. You can think of it this way: switching engines for L1 blockchains is like redefining the "plug specifications" for the entire ecosystem. If your devices happen to use the same plug, you can use it directly; otherwise, you have to pay for the adapter. The list of selected companies determines which L2 investments can seamlessly connect to the future L1, and which will have to pay the adapter costs. Ethereum lacks a voting mechanism to decide these differences. Whether to switch, and which company to switch to, ultimately depends on a rough consensus reached by developers at the All Core Devs meeting, and whether each client team is willing to implement it. Currently, switching engines remains a long-term goal mentioned by Vitalik, and the developer meeting has not yet reached any formal conclusions. Mapping the technology roadmap to the ETH price can be done on two time scales. The first is the mechanism's transmission path. Since EIP-1559, the base fee for each transaction has been burned, so the scale of L1 transaction activity directly affects the dynamic supply and settlement value of ETH. According to this mechanism, if the gigagas target is achieved and L1 transaction volume recovers as throughput increases, gas consumption and burning will increase simultaneously. This is the most direct transmission path between the roadmap and ETH pricing. However, it is important to emphasize that this path is based on the premise that "demand follows the capacity increase," and capacity itself does not automatically create demand. The second layer is the time lag. The roadmap is a phased project spanning three to four years. Before 2026, this roadmap will not change the current state of Ethereum. It is a directional commitment, and Ethereum's directional commitments have a history of delays in the timeline; Merge itself was several years later than early estimates. In other words, this roadmap increases Ethereum's long-term capacity ceiling but does not address the issue of ETH's medium-term value capture. Analyst Ignas's criticism of the roadmap points to this point: it does not cover the tokenomics adjustments of ETH itself. In summary, the final answer points to the same structure: this roadmap increases Ethereum's long-term ceiling but does not immediately solve the issue of ETH's medium-term value capture. Now is not the time to follow the roadmap and engage in FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).Rather than pricing the roadmap itself, a more practical approach is to track several soon-to-be-verifiable milestones: Whether the Glamsterdam upgrade can be successfully launched and completed; whether the gas cap increase and blob demand can continue to grow with L2 activity; whether L1 fee revenue and ETH burning can improve; whether L2 growth can be reflected in L1 through blob payment and settlement demand; and whether the relative performance of ETH against BTC can be repaired in the corresponding roadmap segments for each of these metrics. These can be verified weekly on Etherscan charts and public dashboards like DefiLlama. Changes in any of these aspects are closer to a pricing basis than the roadmap document itself. Any change in any of these aspects will tell the market sooner than the roadmap document itself whether this three-to-four-year restructuring is being realized or delayed. [ChainCatcher]