According to BlockBeats, on July 5th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted that Ethereum researchers recently held a meeting in Berlin to continue discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April and updated the long-term protocol roadmap.

Vitalik stated that "Lean Ethereum" is not a single 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 major iteration, while the current stage may constitute the third major evolution.

He pointed out that future core changes to Ethereum may include: replacing direct verification with recursive STARK verification, introducing quantum-resistant cryptography, adjusting the consensus mechanism to a decoupled usable chain and finality design, and reconstructing the multi-dimensional Gas model and state structure.

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

Vitalik emphasized that privacy capabilities will no longer be an add-on feature, but one of the core goals of protocol design. At the same time, the system will rely more on formal verification to improve security and drive the EVM to move to higher levels of abstraction in the future, with the underlying layer possibly gradually transitioning to RISC-V or leanISA architecture.

In addition, he mentioned that key parameters such as the gas cap, blob capacity, and block time will be adjusted multiple times in the coming years, and Ethereum will continue to scale through client optimization and protocol upgrades.

Vitalik concluded that Ethereum is entering a phase of continuous restructuring and expansion, with the goal of upgrading the underlying system without disrupting the existing application ecosystem.