Vitalik Buterin shares extensive Ethereum roadmap: here's what to expect

Vitalik Buterin shares an extensive look at the future of Ethereum. Following a meeting of Ethereum researchers in Berlin, he publishes a detailed summary of the plans for the coming years. The so-called “Lean Ethereum” direction is not a single major upgrade, but a series of improvements that will unfold over three to four years. Buterin compares it to the Merge: a third major iteration of the protocol in which nearly every component is renewed. The Ethereum price stands at $1.780 at the time of writing, a slight decline of 0.6% in the past 24 hours.

Ethereum is available at OKX and Bybit.

What changes to the Ethereum protocol?

The plans are broad and ambitious. Verification through direct re-execution makes way for recursive STARKs, which become a core part of the protocol. In addition, there will be major changes to the consensus mechanism: decoupled availability and finality, with one or two rounds for finality. This is intended to be both simpler and faster than the current system. Also on the agenda are multidimensional gas, adjustments to the client architecture, and a completely different view of the available types of state.

One of the most far-reaching parts concerns the changes around state. Buterin outlines a possible scenario in 2030 in which Ethereum has both 2 TB of current dynamic state and 100 TB of a new type of state that is more scalable but also more restrictive. This new type works well for ERC20 tokens, NFTs and many DeFi applications, but less well for complex central contracts such as Uniswap or on-chain order books. Existing apps do not have to be rewritten, but it could be very advantageous to do so because of significantly lower transaction costs, more than 10x cheaper in some cases.

Privacy and quantum security get higher priority

Buterin makes it clear that privacy is no longer an afterthought. When designing new components such as Frames, the mempool and extensions to the state tree, the team consciously asks how privacy transactions flow through the system and what the overhead is. Quantum security also moves significantly up the priority list. Finalising a quantum-safe blob design has become urgent and this work has been underway for months.

Regarding the virtual machine, Buterin indicates that Ethereum needs another VM in addition to the EVM, with RISC-V and leanISA as the most likely candidates. His own preference is that the EVM eventually becomes a feature at compiler level, with the protocol itself only seeing RISC-V or leanISA. He also announces that gas limits, blob capacity and slot times will be adjusted multiple times over the next five years. A major increase in the gas limit is already planned for the Glasterdam upgrade. The previously published Lean Ethereum roadmap forms the basis for this.

Michaël van de Poppe reacts positively to the announcement and says this is one of the best messages he has seen from the Ethereum Foundation in a long time. He calls on people not to underestimate Ethereum.