Ethereum Foundation: Defining the Next Decade with "Lean Ethereum"

Author: Justin Drake

Translation: BitpushNews

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of Ethereum. Today, we officially propose the vision of "Lean Ethereum"—which is also my personal mission statement for the next decade.

We stand at the dawn of a new era. Millions of TPS (transactions per second), threats from quantum computing… How can Ethereum pursue extreme performance while upholding the bottom line of security and decentralization?

The core answer lies in: next-generation cryptographic technologies will become key weapons for both offense and defense.

Disclaimer: This article represents Drake's personal views, aimed at a broad audience. A deep technical analysis of hash-based post-quantum signatures and SNARKs will be published later. We look forward to and welcome diverse perspectives from protocol layers, the Ethereum Foundation, and community members, as this will only make us stronger.

Defensive Mode—Fortress Form

Ethereum is unique. Since the genesis block, it has maintained 100% uptime, boasts unmatched client diversity, and has an economic security of $130 billion (35.7 million staked ETH × $3,700 per unit)—which may soon reach $1 trillion.

Ethereum is becoming the cornerstone of the value internet, destined to safeguard trillions of dollars in assets for decades or even centuries to come. It must be able to withstand any threat: nation-state attacks, quantum computers… We call this the fortress form. As long as the internet exists, Ethereum exists. When the world is online, the world is on-chain.

Offensive Mode—Beast Form

Ethereum is ambitious. "Scaling L1, scaling data blocks" has become the strategic focus of the Ethereum Foundation's protocol team. In the next 6-12 months, attainable performance improvements will be realized.

Long-term goals? L1 reaching gigagas gas/second, L2 reaching teragas gas/second. We call this the beast form.

L1 gigagas: 10,000 TPS, ambitions for vertical scaling
L2 teragas: 1 million TPS, grand plans for horizontal scaling

Can scalability and decentralization coexist? Not necessarily. We have mastered key mathematical tools:

Real-time zkVMs for lean execution
Data availability sampling (DAS) for lean data

Even better: full-chain verification can be completed on any browser, wallet, and mobile device.

Lean Upgrades

The Lean Ethereum proposal encompasses a comprehensive upgrade of the three major sub-layers of L1:

Lean Consensus (Beacon Chain 2.0): Strengthening security and decentralization to achieve second-level finality (formerly known as "Beam Chain")
Lean Data (Data Block 2.0): Post-quantum data blocks, supporting refined data block sizes, providing a calldata-like development experience
Lean Execution (EVM 2.0): A minimal and SNARK-friendly instruction set (possibly adopting RISC-V architecture), enhancing performance while maintaining EVM compatibility and network effects

The Consensus Layer (CL), Data Layer (DL), and Execution Layer (EL) have all been reconstructed from first principles, jointly achieving the fortress form and beast form. The goal is to achieve exponential performance improvements while ensuring uncompromising continuity, extreme security, and extreme simplicity.

Lean Cryptography

Hash-based cryptography is becoming the ideal foundation for Lean Ethereum, providing a unified solution for two major trends:

Explosive growth of SNARK technology
The approaching threat of quantum computing

Imagine supporting the entire L1 with the most streamlined cryptographic component—hash functions—alone:

CL: Hash aggregation signatures upgrade to BLS signatures
DL: Hash DAS commitments upgrade to KZG commitments
EL: Hash real-time zkVMs upgrade to EVM re-execution

Lean CL, Lean DL, and Lean EL each have a gem of cryptography.

Lean Craftsmanship

Lean Ethereum is not just a blueprint for strengthening and expanding Ethereum. It transcends the realms of security reinforcement, decentralization, and cutting-edge cryptography, becoming an aesthetic pursuit, an art form, and a standard of craftsmanship. Just like Jiro Ono's artisan spirit in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi"—to go the extra mile, never to fall short.

Minimalism, modularity, encapsulation of complexity, formal verification, provable security, provable optimality… These subtle yet important technical considerations will be elaborated in subsequent articles on post-quantum cryptography.

Lean Legacy

After a glorious decade, Lean Ethereum is a promise of a generation: to ensure Ethereum operates perpetually under any circumstances; to achieve uncompromising scalability; to make it worthy of future users.

This is about legacy. We are builders, we are transmitters, we are Ethereum.

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