Vitalik published an overview of Ethereum's long-term roadmap, Lean Ethereum will become the third major iteration

According to a post by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum researchers recently held a meeting in Berlin to update the long-term development roadmap of the protocol (strawmap.org). Vitalik pointed out that "Lean Ethereum" is not a one-time upgrade, but a series of improvements that will be phased in over the next three to four years, with an importance comparable to the "Merge," covering almost every core module of the protocol.

The main content includes: Verification Mechanism: Introducing recursive STARKs to replace the existing direct re-execution method, becoming a core component at the protocol level; Quantum Security: Significantly elevated priority, all quantum-vulnerable components will be replaced, and the design for quantum-safe Blobs is in progress; Consensus Layer: Decoupling usable chains from finality, achieving one to two rounds of finality, with better security and lower latency; State Layer: The existing dynamic state remains unchanged, but new types of states with greater scalability (such as UTXO storage, circular buffers, etc.) will be added, with an expectation that by 2030 Ethereum will have 2 TB of dynamic state + 100 TB of new type state, allowing for over 10 times reduction in Gas fees after the migration of applications like ERC20 and NFTs; Privacy: Upgrading from an additional feature to a primary goal, integrated into designs such as Mempool and state trees; VM: Introducing leanISA or RISC-V beyond EVM, with the long-term goal of direct protocol layer only.