Lean Ethereum is being called the third major iteration, and it seems Vitalik places a lot of importance on it—comparable to the significance of the last big upgrade, The Merge. It’s not as sensational as The Merge, because The Merge transitioned from PoW to PoS, which was a fundamental consensus overhaul that impacted miners, users, and developers alike. This time, Vitalik has talked a lot about it, but to put it simply, it’s about two things: streamlining and security. Breaking it down into specific goals: achieving sub-second finality, increasing TPS, state re-architecture by introducing smaller ledgers alongside the global ledger for faster and cheaper transactions, changing the validation process to lower costs so that nodes won’t need high-end hardware to participate. On the security side, it’s about advancing quantum resistance, native privacy, and formal verification. These are terms you’ve probably heard often. It doesn’t sound as groundbreaking because we frequently see chains boasting millions of TPS, and security is more of an invisible engineering effort that users don’t directly perceive in terms of the technical trade-offs behind it. If Ethereum can achieve these goals while maintaining its current state and without sacrificing decentralization, each one of them would be a milestone in its own right.