Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher

On July 5, 2026, Vitalik Buterin published a long article on X, announcing a long-term roadmap called Lean Ethereum. Vitalik positioned it as Ethereum's third major evolution following the Merge: it is not a standalone upgrade but a series of protocol improvements that will be implemented in phases over the next three to four years, covering nearly every core module of the protocol, from verification methods and cryptography to finality and state storage, all being reconstructed.

This roadmap emerged amid the reorganization of the Ethereum organization and must be understood in a more comprehensive temporal context. Interpreting this comprehensive reconstruction requires not only clarifying the specific technical upgrades but also understanding how its design rebalances the trade-off between "migration costs" and "verification thresholds," and exploring how this underlying transformation will ultimately transmit to ETH's price performance.

Three Development Phases of Ethereum

To position this upgrade, we can first outline the three generations of Ethereum:

• The first generation is the original architecture of "PoW + EVM," which revolves around all nodes directly re-executing (Re-execution) every transaction. This model, while secure, versatile, and open, is limited in scalability.

• The second generation is the PoS Ethereum after the "Merge" in 2022. This change in the consensus mechanism fundamentally altered Ethereum's security model, issuance model, and staking system, while also demonstrating to the market Ethereum's high engineering capability to replace its core engine without downtime.

• The third generation is the current Lean Ethereum. It is no longer satisfied with the existing division of "L1 is responsible for settlement, L2 is responsible for scalability" but incorporates L1 performance, proved verification, privacy, quantum resistance, state structure, and client architecture into the same long-term reconstruction framework.

Origin of the Lean Ethereum Roadmap

The Lean Ethereum roadmap was published on strawmap.org, which is a public draft first proposed by foundation researcher Justin Drake in February of this year, outlining seven network upgrades until 2029. The term strawmap is derived from straw, and the document positions itself as a draft that can be modified. The strawmap also indicates that it is an ongoing coordination tool, not a fixed timeline, and any upgrades require research, testing, client implementation, and rough consensus.

In this vision, five long-term strategic goals are clearly outlined: faster L1 finality, achieving 1 gigagas throughput for L1 (which could handle tens of thousands of TPS under extreme conditions), L2 scaling with a teragas scale ecological vision, comprehensive defense against quantum cryptography security, and native privacy transfers on L1.

In contrast to the current situation, the radicalness of these goals can be felt. According to Etherscan data, Ethereum L1 currently only processes about 32 transactions per second on average (approximately 2.7 million daily); whereas the 1 gigagas goal implies that L1's computational capacity will explode hundreds of times. Notably, on-chain demand for L1 has actually been in a growth channel over the past year: daily transaction volume has rebounded significantly from 1.4 million in mid-2025, stabilizing between 2 million and 2.9 million since 2026, and even approaching 3.6 million during the market peak in April and May. The introduction of this roadmap is precisely to address the revived demand for on-chain activity.

The timeline is also indicated clearly, with the second upgrade Hegotá scheduled for 2026, likely to be Ethereum's last "pre-Lean era" hard fork. Each subsequent upgrade, in theory, will belong to this reconstruction. The more imminent Glamsterdam upgrade is expected to bring a significant increase to the gas limit; this upgrade was originally expected to launch in the first half of 2026, but has yet to go live.

The timeline has also been one of the most concentrated discussion points after the roadmap was announced. Former Ethereum foundation core researcher and proposer of Ethereum's Danksharding solution, Dankrad Feist, expressed on X that he very much supports the strawmap, but the timeline of three to four years is indeed too slow; with current large language model technology, this upgrade should be completed within a year.

Core Technology Upgrades: Proved Verification and State Restructuring

The technical core of Lean Ethereum lies in fundamentally changing 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 as native core components of the protocol: heavy computations are performed by one prover, while all other nodes only need to verify a streamlined mathematical proof.

This choice also addresses another issue: STARK uses hash cryptography, and there is currently no known quantum attack pathway, while Ethereum's existing signature scheme carries related risks. Vitalik stated that the priority of quantum security is "significantly raised," with plans to replace all quantum-vulnerable components gradually with Winternitz signatures, one of the most urgent needs being to find a quantum-safe design for the blobs necessary for L2 to lower costs.

The consensus layer is also subject to changes; currently, on Ethereum, transactions are confirmed on-chain within seconds, but finality takes about fifteen minutes. The new design separates "block production" from "finality," with the goal of achieving finality after one to two rounds of validator voting, compressing the fifteen minutes to nearly real-time. Additionally, there will be multi-dimensional gas pricing, meaning that different resources like computation, storage, and data transmission will have separate pricing, like water bills and electricity bills being calculated separately, rather than all being lumped together.

Changes to the state architecture directly affect application developers. The state can be understood as Ethereum's real-time ledger, recording all account balances and smart contract data. This ledger will only become thicker over time, and currently, all full nodes must maintain a complete copy, resulting in high on-chain storage costs.

Vitalik's proposal is to structurally layer the storage architecture: the existing fully functional "Dynamic State (Core Essence Area)" will be strictly limited to a hardware threshold of 2 TB to prevent unlimited expansion; simultaneously, the protocol will open a new, more scalable "new state storage layer (large warehouse)" with a capacity of up to 100 TB. In the 2030 vision described by Vitalik, most tokens (ERC-20), NFTs, and regular DeFi applications, if willing to rewrite contracts and move into this new structure's large warehouse, could expect transaction fees to decrease by more than tenfold. The protocol layer does not force or subsidize, but simply places the vast two-layer price difference there, allowing the market applications to decide the timing of migration.

The status of privacy is also redefined. In the past, Ethereum's division of labor was that everything on-chain was public and transparent, and users wanting privacy had to seek third-party privacy protocols. Vitalik wrote this time, Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first-class goal, meaning privacy shifts from being "installed by the resident" to becoming "a part of building regulations": every new component of future protocols will be examined during the design phase for a question: can it support low-cost privacy functionality without intermediaries, and be quantum resistant? However, whether this can be achieved remains to be validated, although the assessment criteria have already been written into the roadmap.

Controversy over EVM Replacement: The Game of L2 Ecosystems

The engine Ethereum has used for the past decade is called the EVM, which is the foundation for contracts, development tools, and programming languages worldwide. Now, Vitalik proposes to replace this engine, a reason related to the earlier discussion on STARK: generating mathematical proofs for transactions with EVM is costly, and switching to a more proof-friendly engine would be much cheaper.

The candidates he names are two architectures, RISC-V and leanISA, with the ideal outcome being for the new engine to become the core protocol, while EVM becomes a translation layer: old contracts can still run, but they must first be translated into commands intelligible to the new engine before executing. The change of engine is relatively more complex, so this proposal has sparked ongoing controversy since Vitalik first introduced the RISC-V concept in April 2025.

L2 Arbitrum's core developer, Offchain Labs, publicly advocated for another architecture, WebAssembly (WASM), last November, claiming that it is the better choice, but WASM was not included in the candidate list provided by Vitalik this time. Why is this important? Because Arbitrum is one of the largest L2 solutions for Ethereum, and its contract technology Stylus is built on WASM.

You can understand it this way: if L1 is to change its engine, it essentially redefines the "plug specifications" for the entire ecosystem. If your device happens to use the same type of plug, you can continue using it; if not, you have to spend money to make an adapter. Who is selected on the list will determine which L2's past investments can seamlessly connect with the future L1, and which will incur transition costs.

Ethereum has no voting mechanism to resolve these discrepancies; whether to change or what to change to ultimately depends on the rough consensus among developers at the All Core Devs meetings and the willingness of various client teams to implement changes. So far, the engine change remains a long-term goal spoken of by Vitalik, and there has been no formal conclusion from developer meetings.

Will the Roadmap Affect ETH Prices?

Mapping the technical roadmap to ETH prices corresponds to two temporal levels.

The first layer is the pathway of mechanistic transmission. Since EIP-1559, for every transaction, the base fee of Ethereum is destroyed, and thus the scale of L1 transaction activity directly affects ETH's supply dynamics and settlement value. According to this mechanism, if the gigagas target is achieved, and L1 transaction volume rebounds with increased throughput, gas consumption and destruction will amplify in sync, forming the most direct transmission path between the roadmap and ETH pricing. However, it is important to emphasize that this path only holds if "demand returns after capacity increases"; capacity itself does not automatically create demand.

The second layer is the time lag. The roadmap outlines a phased engineering process over three to four years; within 2026, this roadmap will not change any existing conditions on Ethereum; it is a directional commitment. Furthermore, Ethereum's directional commitments have a history of delays in timelines, with the Merge itself taking several years longer than initially estimated. In other words, this roadmap enhances Ethereum's long-term capacity limits but does not address the mid-term value capture issues of ETH; analyst Ignas's criticism of the roadmap points exactly to this aspect, as it does not encompass adjustments to ETH's token economics.

Observation List for the Next Decade

Summarizing the above content, the ultimate answer points to the same structure: this strawmap raises Ethereum's long-term limits but does not immediately solve the mid-term value capture issue for ETH; now is not the time for FOMO according to the roadmap.

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

• Can the Glamsterdam upgrade be successfully launched and the gas limit increased?

• Can blob demand continue to grow with L2 activity?

• Can L1 fee revenue and ETH destruction improve?

• Can L2's growth feedback to L1 through blob payments and settlement demand?

• Can ETH's relative performance against BTC recover?

These indicators correspond to various aspects of the roadmap and can be weekly validated on charts like Etherscan and public dashboards such as DefiLlama; any change in any of these will be closer to pricing basis than the roadmap document itself. Any changes will tell the market earlier than the roadmap document itself whether this three to four-year reconstruction is truly being fulfilled or postponed.

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