BlockBeats News, July 5th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a post stating that Ethereum researchers recently held a meeting in Berlin, following up on discussions with client teams in April in Svalbard, updating the long-term protocol roadmap.

Vitalik stated that "Lean Ethereum" is not a one-time upgrade, but rather a series of protocol evolutions that will be gradually implemented over the next 3 to 4 years. Its impact can be compared to "The Merge" as the second significant iteration, with the current stage potentially forming the third major evolution.

He pointed out that future core changes to Ethereum may include: adopting recursive STARK verification to replace direct execution verification, introducing post-quantum cryptographic systems, adjusting the consensus mechanism to a decoupled liveness and finality design, and restructuring the Gas model and state architecture in multiple dimensions.

At the state layer, Ethereum may form a "two-layer state structure" around 2030, including a roughly 2TB traditional dynamic state and a roughly 100TB new scalable state to support the scaling needs of various application scenarios.

Vitalik emphasized that privacy capabilities will no longer be an add-on feature but one of the core design goals of the protocol. The system will increasingly rely on formal verification to improve security, and will drive the EVM towards higher-level abstractions in the future, with the underlying layers gradually transitioning to RISC-V or leanISA architecture.

Furthermore, he mentioned that key parameters such as Gas limits, Blob capacity, and block time will undergo multiple adjustments in the coming years, and Ethereum will continue to achieve scalability through client optimizations and protocol upgrades.

In conclusion, Vitalik stated that Ethereum is entering a phase of continuous restructuring and expansion, aiming to complete underlying system upgrades without disrupting the existing application ecosystem.