Vitalik Outlines Ethereum's Multi-Year Upgrade Roadmap, Lean Ethereum to Reshape Protocol by 2030

According to Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum researchers recently gathered to finalize a long-term development roadmap for the protocol. Vitalik described Lean Ethereum as a series of staged improvements spanning 3-4 years, with significance comparable to the Merge. The initiative encompasses a protocol-wide overhaul including recursive STARKs for verification, quantum-safe component upgrades, decoupled consensus layers enabling one-to-two-round finality, and privacy elevated to a core design principle.

By 2030, the state layer is projected to scale to 2 TB of dynamic state plus 100 TB of new-state variants, potentially reducing gas fees tenfold for migrated applications like ERC-20 and NFTs. The roadmap also introduces leanISA or RISC-V as VM alternatives to the EVM at the protocol level.