On July 5, 2026, Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy article on X, announcing a long-term roadmap called Lean Ethereum. Vitalik positioned it as the third major evolution of Ethereum after Merge: it is not a single upgrade, but a series of protocol improvements to be implemented in stages over the next three to four years, covering almost every core module of the protocol, from verification methods, cryptography, finality to state storage, all completely reconstructed.
This roadmap was created during the Ethereum organizational restructuring and must be understood within a more complete timeline. Interpreting this comprehensive refactoring requires not only clarifying the specific technical upgrades, but also understanding how its design redistributes and balances "migration costs" and "validation thresholds," and exploring how this fundamental change will ultimately impact ETH's price performance.
Ethereum's three development stages
To understand this upgrade, we can first outline the three generations of Ethereum:
The first generation was the original architecture of "PoW EVM," 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, and also proved to the market that Ethereum has extremely high engineering capabilities to replace its core engine without downtime.
The third generation is today's Lean Ethereum. It is no longer satisfied with the existing division of labor of "L1 is responsible for settlement and L2 is responsible for scaling". Instead, it incorporates L1 performance, proven verification, privacy, quantum resistance, state structure and client architecture into the same long-term refactoring framework.
The origin of the Lean Ethereum roadmap
The Lean Ethereum roadmap, published on strawmap.org, is a public draft first proposed by Lean Ethereum researcher Justin Drake in February of this year, outlining seven network upgrades up to 2029. The name "strawmap" comes from "straw," and the document positions itself as a draft open to modification. Strawmap also notes that it is an ongoing coordination tool, not a locked timeline; any upgrades still require 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 transfers.
The sheer scale of these goals becomes apparent when compared to the current situation. 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 goal 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 specifically 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 limit; this upgrade was originally anticipated to launch in the first half of 2026 but has not yet been released.
The timeline has also 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 the three to four-year timeline is too slow. He believes that the upgrade should be completed within a year using the current large language model technology.
Major upgrade of core technologies: proof verification and state reconstruction
The core technology of Lean Ethereum fundamentally changes the verification model. Currently, Ethereum's security model requires each node to re-execute every transaction to confirm the state is correct. 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 raises another issue: STARK uses hash cryptography and currently has 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 pressing 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.
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, resulting in persistently high on-chain storage costs.
Vitalik's solution involves a structurally layered 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 significant price difference between the two layers, allowing market applications to decide when to migrate.
The status of privacy has also been redefined. Previously, Ethereum's division of labor was: everything on-chain was open and transparent; 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 whether it can support man-in-the-middle and quantum-resistant privacy features at low cost. Whether this can be achieved remains to be seen, but the evaluation criteria themselves are already included in the roadmap.
EVM Replacement Controversy: The Game of the L2 Ecosystem
For the past decade, Ethereum has used the EVM engine, around which contracts, development tools, and programming languages worldwide are built. Now, Vitalik has proposed replacing this engine, citing reasons related to STARK's earlier point: 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 is 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 put forward the RISC-V concept in April 2025.
Offchain Labs, the core developer behind L2 Arbitrum, publicly advocated last November that WebAssembly (WASM) was a better alternative architecture, but WASM was not on Vitalik's shortlist of candidates. Why is this important? Because Arbitrum is one of Ethereum's largest L2 platforms, and its contract technology, Stylus, is built on WASM.
This can be understood as follows: If L1 needs to change its engine, it's like redefining the "plug specifications" for the entire ecosystem. If your equipment happens to use the same plug, you can use it directly; otherwise, you'll have to pay for the adapter yourself. The list of companies selected determines which L2 investments can seamlessly connect to the future L1, and which companies will have to pay the adapter costs.
Ethereum lacks a voting mechanism to resolve such disagreements. Whether to switch engines, and which 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. As of now, switching engines remains a long-term goal as stated by Vitalik, and the developer meeting has not yet reached any formal conclusion.
Will the roadmap affect the price of ETH?
Mapping the technology roadmap to the ETH price allows us to consider two time horizons.
The first layer is the transmission path in terms of mechanism. Since EIP-1559, Ethereum has burned the base fee for each transaction, so the scale of L1 transaction activity directly affects the supply dynamics and settlement value of ETH. According to this mechanism, if the gigagas target is achieved and L1 transaction volume rebounds with the increase in throughput, 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 increase in capacity"; capacity itself does not automatically create demand.
The second layer is the time lag. The roadmap outlines a phased project over three to four years, and by 2026, it won't change the current state of Ethereum. It's a directional commitment, and Ethereum's directional commitments have a history of delays in their timelines; Merge itself was several years later than earlier estimates. In other words, this roadmap increases Ethereum's long-term capacity ceiling but doesn't address ETH's medium-term value capture; analyst Ignas's criticism of the roadmap points precisely to this: it doesn't cover the tokenomics adjustments of ETH itself.
https://sites.google.com/view/ethwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/ethknowledge/https://sites.google.com/view/ethmd/https://sites.google.com/view/solnewsa/https://sites.google.com/view/solgert/https://sites.google.com/view/soleoewallet/accueil/https://sites.google.com/view/chzwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/chzok/https://sites.google.com/view/chznews/https://sites.google.com/view/usdtwallets/https://sites.google.com/view/xrpwallet/https://eoewallet.com/https://sites.google.com/view/dogewallets/https://sites.google.com/view/shibwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/pepewallet/https://sites.google.com/view/xlmwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/bnbwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/ltcwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/trxwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/zecwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/adawallet/https://sites.google.com/view/bchwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/uniwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/nearwallets/https://sites.google.com/view/hypewallet/https://sites.google.com/view/wbtcwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/xmrwallets/https://sites.google.com/view/linkwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/daiwallet/https://sites.google.com/view/tonwallet/Watchlist for the next decade
After summarizing the preceding content, the final answer actually points to the same structure: this draft map raises the long-term ceiling of Ethereum, but it does not immediately solve the problem of ETH's mid-term value capture. Now is not the time to follow the roadmap for FOMO.
Rather than pricing the roadmap itself, a more workable approach is to track a few milestones that can be verified in the near future:
Will the Glamsterdam upgrade be able to start smoothly and complete the gas limit increase?
Will blob demand continue to grow with L2 activity?
Can L1 fee revenue and ETH burning be improved?
Can the growth of L2 be fed back to L1 through blob payment and settlement needs?
Can the relative performance of ETH against BTC recover?
These metrics each correspond to a stage of the roadmap and can be verified weekly on Etherscan's charts and public dashboards like DefiLlama. Changes to any one of them are closer to the pricing basis than the roadmap document itself. Any change to any one of them will tell the market earlier than the roadmap document itself whether this three-to-four-year restructuring is being realized or delayed.
