Vitalik: Ethereum to Enter an Era of Slimming in the Next 5 Years, with Anti-Quantum and Privacy as Primary Goals

Odaily reported that Vitalik Buterin stated on platform X that Ethereum researchers have finalized the "Ethereum Slimming" roadmap during a recent meeting in Berlin. This roadmap is not a single upgrade but a series of forks spanning 3 to 4 years. Starting from the "I-star" fork, it will become the third major phase of Ethereum and will replace most core components. Core changes include shifting verification from direct execution to recursive STARKs, introducing 1 to 2 rounds of finality in consensus, multi-dimensional gas pricing, and completely replacing existing schemes with quantum-resistant cryptography. In terms of the state model, the current dynamic state will only expand to approximately 2TB, while new scalable states such as UTXO and ring buffers will be introduced, with a total size potentially reaching 100TB, suitable for ERC20, NFTs, and DeFi. After rewriting, transaction fees can be reduced by more than 10 times; complex applications like Uniswap pools will retain their old state without mandatory migration. Privacy will be elevated to a first-class design goal, with all new components required to support quantum-resistant, intermediary-free private transactions. Formal verification will be fully deployed, and the exploration of introducing RISC-V or leanISA as the underlying protocol VM will be undertaken. The EVM may transition into a compilation-layer feature in the future. Gas limits, Blob capacity, and block times will be increased multiple times over the next 5 years, with the Glasterdam fork first raising the gas limit. Regarding the fork order, the H-star Hegota fork will be the last "pre-slimming" fork, after which the era of slimming will begin.