Translation: Baihua Blockchain

The Ethereum research community has recently been in full swing. From July 4 until now, Vitalik Buterin first restructured Ethereum's long-term direction, released a new "Extremely Lean Chain" research post, and explicitly emphasized a proposal to introduce Bitcoin-style UTXO into Ethereum.

These trends are interesting when viewed individually, but when put together, we can see more clearly: What Ethereum is evolving into.

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin, continuing the discussions from April in Svalbard with the client teams to further plan for the long-term evolution of the protocol. The updated strawmap has been released, and I have attached the image in this post. — vitalik.eth, July 4, 2026

The background here is the so-called strawmap, which is what the Ethereum Foundation refers to as a "route draft" — a document covering the L1 upgrade outline through the end of this decade, which was just updated in late June. Subsequently, on July 4, Vitalik also provided his summary of these changes:

“Lean Ethereum is not a one-time single-point upgrade, but a series of improvements that will be gradually introduced to the Ethereum network over the next three to four years. But don’t get me wrong, it is indeed Ethereum's third major iteration, just like the Merge was the second.”

He went on to state that, along this evolutionary arc, almost all major components of the network will be replaced: from how blocks are validated, to how consensus is reached, to what 'state' itself actually means. So, what will happen next?

Of course, the strawmap is not a single narrative thread. However, from these major trends, combined with Vitalik's comments, we can summarize several overarching themes. For example:

• Verification is replacing repeat execution — Currently, each Ethereum node re-executes every transaction to check if the computation on the chain is correct. In the Lean era, nodes will instead check cryptographic proofs, that is, recursive STARK. This change will make "proving correctness" itself cheaper, further promoting execution scaling, reducing hardware requirements, and creating more room for subsequent optimizations.

• Ethereum is beginning "state reduction" — A multi-level state system is taking shape. The current flexible but heavier “dynamic” state will still be retained, but the future growth space will be relatively limited. In contrast, the newly emerging types of state will be cheaper and slightly less flexible but will allow for more aggressive scalability. Vitalik proposed a hypothetical 2030 Ethereum: the former approximately 2TB, while the latter could expand to 100TB. Migration to these new state types will not be mandatory, but economic incentives will come into play because they can provide projects and users with significantly lower fees.

• Privacy and quantum resistance become design pillars — While most public chains are still 1) completely transparent, 2) slow to act on quantum resistance solutions, Ethereum researchers have already elevated privacy experience and quantum defense as essential pre-considerations, around which core design principles are built. As Vitalik stated: “When designing Frames, mempool, and the newly added content in the state tree, we will clearly ask: 'How can quantum-safe and non-intermediary-dependent privacy protocol transactions go through this system? What is the cost?’”

These advancements will not land like the Merge in a single upgrade, but will be dispersed across 6 to 7 forks between now and 2029. Of course, the fact that it is called a strawmap also indicates that it is merely a draft route; the Ethereum Foundation has consistently emphasized that this timetable and routing are more for reference in coordination than fixed construction blueprints.

However, it is exciting that related new mechanism proposals are now emerging almost daily.

A current typical example is: This morning, Vitalik released "The Extremely Lean Chain", a design proposal aimed at compressing Ethereum's consensus layer to an almost extremely minimalist state.

In the current Ethereum architecture, Beacon Chain needs to keep a rather bloated record for each validator and handles balance updates for all validators at each epoch. In Vitalik's proposed evolutionary version, the data stored on-chain for each validator only requires about 6 bytes, a reduction of 95% compared to today's approximately 121 bytes.

This mechanism operates by having each ETH staker generate a ZK proof daily, proving their updated balance and then submitting it to the chain. This way, Ethereum effectively shifts from "keeping accounts" to "checking receipts." If any staker misses the proof submission for a day, they simply cannot participate in attestation temporarily, and once submitted, they can recover, without being slashed.

As Vitalik put it, the biggest advantage of this path is that it "could allow consensus to scale to millions of validators when necessary." Will this become the basis for lowering the 32 ETH staking threshold in the future? We will have to see. But this design has other advantages, such as, in its complete form, validators will even re-register daily with new public keys, paving the way for anonymous staking.

However, Vitalik's “Extremely Lean” proposal is just one of the directions worth paying attention to at present. Another mechanism draft that may also have a significant impact on Ethereum was just published by Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter, titled "Native UTXOs on Ethereum".

What if we directly borrowed Bitcoin’s transaction model? This is the core of this proposal. Today, receiving a payment on Ethereum leaves a permanent record. When an address first holds ETH or some token, every node must permanently save this state item — even if the address was only used once. Multiplying this model by billions of payments makes the state inflation crisis a real issue.

Wahrstätter's idea is to shift to Bitcoin-style UTXO, that is, "unspent transaction outputs" — essentially a one-time value package that gets consumed once spent. Furthermore, in the Ethereum version of the proposal, the chain doesn't even have to store the UTXO itself. Its details can remain in the chain's historical data, being proven when needed; while in the chain's permanent state, only a bit needs to be reserved for each UTXO to mark whether it has been spent.

According to Wahrstätter's calculations, this transformation would reduce the permanent state related to payment flows by about 99.8%. Combined with innovations like frame transactions, this new transaction method will also allow newly generated addresses to receive and spend funds without holding ETH for gas, paving the way for a smoother stealth address experience on L1.

Looking at a higher perspective: If such concepts can ultimately land on Ethereum, then this network will become healthier, more durable, and more flexible, also getting closer to that forward-looking North Star. Personally, I am most interested in these new types of states, and how they will influence application layers, fungible tokens, and NFT experiments.

But regardless of what the next step will be specifically and when it will come, the forward direction of Ethereum is clearer than ever. This is bullish.

Article link: https://www.hellobtc.com/kp/du/07/6373.html

Source: https://www.bankless.com/read/ethereums-third-and-ultimate-form-is-taking-shape