Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted his vision for the network’s next few years this weekend. He’s calling it a “Lean Ethereum” strawmap.
Three big priorities: quantum resistance, scalability, and privacy. Quantum safety in particular has moved way up the list. Buterin said finalizing a quantum-safe solution for blobs has “become urgent.”
Privacy is now a “first class goal” too. That’s new. And it’s a big shift in how the Ethereum Foundation is framing things.
Part of the plan involves a new virtual machine. leanISA and RISC-V are the top candidates. The idea is to support programmable privacy and better scalability at the protocol level.
Buterin compared the scope of these changes to the Merge back in 2022. That’s not nothing. The Merge was the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. This would be on a similar scale, spread over three to four years.
The timing raises questions though. Dankrad Feist, a researcher behind the Tempo blockchain, said the timeline is too slow. He thinks AI could help developers ship these upgrades within a year. Ignas Fiodorovas, a crypto analyst, liked the plan but pointed out the Ethereum Foundation’s history of missing deadlines. He also noted one big omission: improved tokenomics for ETH.
All this comes after a rough few months at the Ethereum Foundation. They laid off about 20% of staff last month. Budget cuts hit 40%. Several top contributors left too, including Hsiao-Wei Wang, Tomasz Stańczak, Tim Beiko, and Barnabé Monnot.
So the “lean” part isn’t just about the tech. The organization itself is getting leaner. Whether that helps or hurts delivery remains to be seen.
