Vitalik Buterin · Ethereum · The Block
Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum’s next rebuild will rival the Merge, and take three to four years
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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published his takeaways from an updated version of the network's draft long-term roadmap, describing the multi-year "Lean Ethereum" effort as a near-total rebuild of how the network operates.
Key facts
- Ether (ETH) was trading at roughly $1,780 as of Sunday afternoon Eastern Time, down about 1% over the past day, 's Ethereum Price page
- The post arrives about a week and a half after the Ethereum Foundation concluded a restructuring that cut 54 staff, roughly 20% of its workforce
- As an illustration, he described a possible Ethereum in 2030 where the new storage tier holds 50 times more data than the old one
- The idea has been contested since Buterin first proposed a RISC-V swap in April 2025
Summary
In an X post Saturday, Buterin wrote that Lean Ethereum "is not a single one-shot upgrade" but a series of improvements arriving over three or four years. The post follows a meeting of Ethereum researchers in Berlin in late June, Buterin said. The changes Buterin listed touch nearly everything: how the network confirms transactions are valid, the cryptography protecting it from future quantum computers, how quickly transactions become final, and how the chain stores its data. Buterin also gave the effort a timeline marker, saying Hegota, currently slated as Ethereum's second upgrade of 2026, is probably the network's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork.