Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new set of takeaways on "Lean Ethereum," the multi-year plan to rebuild most of the network's protocol, in a post on X on July 4.
Buterin said the update follows a meeting of Ethereum researchers in Berlin two weeks earlier, which continued discussions held with client teams in Svalbard in April. The revised roadmap, known as the strawmap, was published alongside the post.
Buterin called Lean Ethereum "the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second," adding that "almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced" over three to four years. He said the rollout is designed, like the 2022 Merge, to minimize disruption to existing applications.
According to Buterin's post, the plan replaces direct transaction re-execution with verification through recursive STARKs, a cryptographic proof system he said would become "an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol."
Other listed changes include swapping quantum-vulnerable cryptography for quantum-safe alternatives, decoupling the available chain from finality to enable one- or two-round finality, introducing multidimensional gas, altering what types of state the network supports, and changing client architecture.
