A Year Later, 'Lean Ethereum' Sets Off Again: What Does Ethereum Aim to Deliver?

Written by: imToken

In the past few years, most of Ethereum's upgrades can be explained with a relatively clear goal: scalability.

From Rollups, Blobs, data availability, to continuously increasing Gas Limits, the discussions have revolved around how to enable Ethereum to handle more transactions while reducing costs. Therefore, even if ordinary users do not understand every EIP, they can intuitively grasp that these upgrades ultimately aim to make the chain faster and cheaper.

However, recently, Ethereum has begun to frequently discuss some issues that are not so easily priced by the market. Especially on July 4, Vitalik Buterin summarized the core direction of Lean Ethereum based on the updated long-term roadmap for Ethereum, referring to it as Ethereum's "third major iteration" following The Merge.

At the same time, another study on 0x02 compounding validators provided a supplementary clue from the perspective of staking rewards, suggesting that for smaller stakers, the native compounding mechanism could bring about a relative increase of approximately 5% in consensus layer APR.

On the surface, these seem to be different topics, but when put together, it becomes evident that Ethereum may be undergoing a deeper narrative reconstruction: it is beginning to rethink how to support operations for the next decade or even longer through a more decentralized organizational structure, more easily verifiable protocol layers, and more sustainable revenue models.

1. From 'One Foundation' to Multiple Responsibility Nodes

For a long time, the outside world has been accustomed to equating the Ethereum Foundation (EF) with Ethereum itself.

Whether it is protocol upgrades, research directions, ecological funding, or external communication, many issues ultimately boil down to one question: What is EF planning to do?

However, it is well known that the Ethereum Foundation is not an ordinary company. It does not have shareholders in the traditional sense, does not aim for market share and quarterly profits, and does not "actually own" the Ethereum network, which has always put EF in a position of inherent tension.

On one hand, Ethereum needs someone to invest long-term in protocol development, organizational upgrades, and public goods construction; on the other hand, if research, funding, talent, and decision-making increasingly concentrate within the foundation, then EF itself becomes the largest source of centralization risk for Ethereum.

Recent organizational changes are intentionally breaking this perception. In the latest round of adjustments, EF has reduced its workforce by about 20% and refocused its internal work on different levels such as protocols, users, and institutions. According to EF's description of itself, this is to become "more streamlined and focused," prioritizing core tasks that only the foundation can and must undertake.

At the same time, some capabilities that were originally concentrated within EF are beginning to shift to independent external organizations, as mentioned in the previous article (see extended reading "From 'One Foundation' to 'Multi-Node Governance': Is Ethereum Undergoing a Silent Power Restructuring?"):

• On June 22, five former core researchers from the Ethereum Foundation announced the establishment of Ethlabs, an independently operated non-profit research lab that will undertake protocol research, infrastructure, and institutional-level technical needs;
• On July 1, another independent non-profit organization, Ethereum Institutional, officially launched, taking over the institutional collaboration work previously handled by EF's market expansion team, becoming an independent interface for traditional financial institutions to enter the Ethereum ecosystem;

The two correspond to technical research and institutional adoption, forming a new specialized division of labor, and marking that Ethereum is attempting to split the research, ecology, and market functions that were previously concentrated in one organization into multiple relatively independent responsibility nodes—where EF focuses more on protocol layers and self-sovereignty, Ethlabs promotes long-term research, Ethereum Institutional handles institutional communication, and other organizations continue to undertake education, developer support, and application implementation.

From an organizational structure perspective, this model will undoubtedly increase coordination costs. After all, different institutions have different funding sources, priorities, and execution rhythms, and there may be route divergences or even resource competition in the future.

However, on the other hand, a decentralized protocol that relies on a single foundation to complete almost all key tasks is also a structural risk.

Therefore, the changes at the organizational level of Ethereum are not truly answering "who will replace EF," but rather whether Ethereum can establish a collaborative structure that allows core work to continue to be undertaken by other nodes even if a certain organization reduces, shifts, or disappears.

This "subtraction at the organizational level" also lays the groundwork for the upcoming protocol shift.

2. The Shift in Technical Narrative: What Exactly Does Lean Ethereum Aim to Achieve?

Strictly speaking, Lean Ethereum is not a concept that emerged for the first time last week.

As early as July 2025, Ethereum Foundation (EF) researcher Justin Drake published a vision for the development of "lean Ethereum" over the next decade, proposing directions such as Lean Consensus, Lean Execution, and Lean Data, with main goals including expanding the base layer TPS to 10,000 per second, and L2 networks to 10 million, while maintaining decentralization and 100% uptime.

At that time, it was already clear that Ethereum would undergo significant upgrades at the consensus layer, data layer, and execution layer, including upgrading the beacon chain to version 2.0, introducing blobs 2.0 for the post-quantum era, and possibly building EVM 2.0 based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set; in terms of cryptography, the system would rely entirely on hash-based signatures, hash root data commitments, and native hash zero-knowledge virtual machines to achieve resistance to quantum computing.

Thus, the truly important change this week is that Vitalik, based on the latest strawmap, has elevated these scattered research directions to a clearer position—Lean Ethereum is not a one-time hard fork, but a series of transformations that will be gradually launched over the next three to four years, and it is what he defines as Ethereum's "third major iteration."

According to Vitalik's summary, Lean Ethereum almost involves all core parts of the protocol, reflected in several directions:

• Protocol simplification, shifting from "heavy execution" to "light verification": by using recursive STARK as the core, native components, replacing direct transaction re-execution with proof verification, while adjusting client architecture, state models, and multi-dimensional Gas, with the goal of making the protocol itself more streamlined and more formally verifiable;
• Quantum resistance prioritized: Quantum safety has been significantly advanced from "long-term consideration" to immediate action, with existing cryptographic components that are vulnerable to quantum computing threats gradually being replaced with quantum-resistant solutions, and the quantum safety design of blobs has also been listed as an urgent matter;
• Privacy is no longer viewed as a feature that needs additional application layer supplements, but will become a first-class goal in protocol design: no longer a post-hoc patch, but a native capability of the protocol. The new Frames, mempool, and state tree designs will support quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy transactions;
• The consensus layer will attempt to decouple block availability from finality: aiming to achieve second-level finality (1-2 rounds of voting), while significantly reducing the burden on validators and light clients through state redesign (dynamic states coexisting with new scalable state types);

These directions may seem very complex, but they share a common logic, which is to concentrate computation and complexity on a few nodes responsible for generating proofs, allowing more participants to verify results at a lower cost.

Ultimately, Ethereum no longer regards "short-term TPS" or "L2 compatibility" as the sole narrative axis, but re-emphasizes the underlying attributes of the protocol as a "long-term trusted infrastructure," which naturally includes verifiability, censorship resistance, quantum resistance, privacy-friendliness, and lightweight verification. This is also the significant shift of Ethereum over the next 10 years from "engineering iteration" to "principle return."

In this context, the 0x02 compounding validators also reflect a similar long-term perspective.

In the past, discussions around ETH Staking mainly revolved around APR and DeFi compounding yields. However, under the traditional 0x01 model, each validator's effective balance cap is 32 ETH, and rewards exceeding 32 ETH will be periodically withdrawn from the consensus layer and will no longer participate in staking.

Thus, for small stakers with only one or a few validators, they need to wait for rewards to accumulate back to 32 ETH before they can activate a new validator and once again receive staking rewards, which undoubtedly puts them at a natural disadvantage in compounding efficiency; whereas large service providers can aggregate rewards from numerous validators and quickly activate new nodes.

Therefore, Pectra introduces the 0x02 model, raising the maximum effective balance of a single validator to 2048 ETH and allowing rewards to continue participating in staking in increments of 1 ETH, which lowers the threshold for small stakers to achieve compounding, narrows the capital efficiency gap between participants of different scales, and reduces redundant validators and network operational burdens.

Of course, it cannot simply be equated with "more decentralized validators." More accurately, 0x02 improves the operational efficiency of the validator set at the protocol level while also enhancing the capital efficiency and relative position of small stakers, allowing participants of different scales to obtain native protocol yields with lower friction.

This aligns with the direction of Lean Ethereum, as both emphasize the same thing—maintaining a long-running Ethereum with less redundancy and friction.

3. What Kind of Ethereum Should We Expect in the Next Decade?

From EF's scale reduction to the emergence of independent organizations like Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional; from prioritizing scalability to Lean Ethereum re-emphasizing protocol simplification, quantum resistance, privacy, and light verification; to the 0x02 validators transforming staking rewards from periodic withdrawals to gradually becoming sustainable reinvestment of native income, these changes are not isolated from one another.

They all perform similar subtractions, such as reducing Ethereum's dependence on a single organization, lowering the costs ordinary participants must bear to verify the protocol, and minimizing idle and redundant expenses of staking capital during operations.

Correspondingly, Ethereum hopes to achieve a more decentralized responsibility system, a more easily verifiable underlying protocol, and a revenue structure more suitable for long-term holders and network security participants.

These changes are unlikely to serve as immediate price catalysts.

After all, Lean Ethereum will take three to four years or even longer to gradually materialize; the new organizational structure needs to prove that multi-node collaboration will not lead to directional splits; and the compounding advantages of 0x02 validators will require a complete cycle to fully manifest.

However, what Ethereum truly needs to prove in the next phase may not just be how many upgrades it can still complete.

More importantly, as the value carried by the protocol increases and the external environment becomes more complex, can it become less dependent on a single organization and easier for ordinary devices to verify, allowing the capital participating in network security to obtain more stable and sustainable long-term returns?

The so-called Lean is not about making Ethereum smaller, but about putting back at the center of the protocol what is truly needed for the next few decades.

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