After a year, "Lean Ethereum" sets off again: What answer does Ethereum want to deliver?

In the past few years, most of Ethereum's upgrades could be explained by a relatively clear goal: scaling.

From Rollups, Blobs, and data availability to continuously increasing the Gas Limit, the discussions have all revolved around how to enable Ethereum to handle more transactions and reduce costs. Therefore, even if ordinary users don't understand every single EIP, they can intuitively grasp that these upgrades are ultimately aimed at making the chain faster and cheaper.

However, recently, Ethereum has begun to frequently discuss issues that are not so easily priced by the market. Particularly on July 4th, based on the updated long-term Ethereum roadmap, Vitalik Buterin re-summarized the core direction of Lean Ethereum and called it 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 yields. For smaller stakers, the native compounding mechanism could bring a relative improvement of about 5% in the consensus layer APR.

On the surface, these seem like different topics. But when considered together, it becomes clear that Ethereum might be undergoing a deeper narrative reconstruction: it is rethinking how to support its operations for the next decade or even longer through a more decentralized organizational structure, a more easily verifiable protocol foundation, and a more sustainable yield model.

1. From "One Foundation" to Multiple Nodes of Responsibility

For a long time in the past, the outside world was accustomed to equating the Ethereum Foundation (EF) with Ethereum itself.

Whether regarding protocol upgrades, research directions, ecosystem funding, or external communications, many questions would ultimately boil down to one sentence: What is the EF going to do?

But, as is well known, the Ethereum Foundation is not an ordinary company. It has no shareholders in the traditional sense, does not aim for market share or quarterly profits, and does not "actually own" the Ethereum network. This has always placed the EF in a state of inherent tension.

On one hand, Ethereum needs individuals committed long-term to protocol research and development, organizing upgrades, and building public goods. On the other hand, if research, funding, talent, and decision-making become increasingly concentrated within the foundation, then the EF itself could become Ethereum's biggest source of centralization risk.

However, recent organizational changes are deliberately challenging this perception. In the latest round of adjustments, the EF has, on one hand, reduced its headcount by about 20%, and on the other hand, refocused its internal work on different levels such as protocol, users, and institutions. According to the EF's own description, this is to become "leaner, more focused," prioritizing core tasks that only the foundation can and must undertake.

Concurrently, some capabilities previously concentrated within the EF are starting to be transferred to external independent organizations. As detailed in the previous article (see also: From "One Foundation" to "Multi-Node Governance": Is Ethereum Undergoing a Silent Power Restructuring?):

• On June 22, five former core Ethereum Foundation researchers announced the establishment of Ethlabs, an independent non-profit R&D lab to take over 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 the EF's business development team, acting as an independent interface for traditional financial institutions entering the Ethereum ecosystem.

These two entities address technology R&D and institutional adoption respectively, forming a new specialized division of labor. This also signifies Ethereum's attempt to split the research, ecosystem, and market functions previously concentrated within one organization into multiple relatively independent nodes of responsibility—where the EF focuses more on the protocol layer and self-sovereignty, Ethlabs drives long-term R&D, Ethereum Institutional handles institutional communication, and other organizations continue to cover education, developer support, and application deployment.

From an organizational structure perspective, this model will undoubtedly increase coordination costs. After all, different entities have varying funding sources, priorities, and execution rhythms, and diverging paths or even resource competition may arise in the future.

But on the flip side, a decentralized protocol relying long-term on a single foundation to perform almost all critical work is in itself a structural risk.

Therefore, the real question answered by these organizational changes at Ethereum is not "who will replace the EF," but whether Ethereum can establish a collaborative structure where, even if one organization shrinks, pivots, or disappears, the core work can still be carried on by other nodes.

This "subtraction at the organizational layer" also lays the groundwork for the subsequent shift in protocol direction.

2. The Shift in Technological Narrative: What Does Lean Ethereum Really Aim to Do?

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

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

Even then, it was clear that Ethereum would undergo major upgrades at the consensus, data, and execution layers, including upgrading the Beacon Chain to version 2.0, introducing post-quantum blobs 2.0, and potentially 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-based zero-knowledge virtual machines to achieve quantum resistance.

So, the truly important change this week is that Vitalik, based on the latest strawman map, has elevated these scattered research directions to a more definitive position—Lean Ethereum is not a single hard fork, but a series of transformations rolled out gradually over the next three to four years, representing what he defines as Ethereum's "third major iteration."

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

• Protocol Simplification, shifting from "heavy execution" to "light verification": Using recursive STARKs as the core, native component, replacing direct transaction re-execution with proof verification. Client architecture, the state model, and multi-dimensional gas will all be adjusted accordingly, aiming to make the protocol itself leaner and more formally verifiable.
• Quantum Resistance Prioritized: Quantum safety has been moved significantly forward from a "long-term consideration." Existing cryptographic components vulnerable to quantum computing threats will be gradually replaced with quantum-resistant schemes. The quantum-safe design of blobs is also listed as an urgent matter.
• Privacy is No Longer an Add-on for Applications, but a First-Class Goal in Protocol Design: No longer a post-hoc patch, but a native protocol capability. New Frames, mempool, and state tree designs will support quantum-safe, trust-minimized private transactions.
• The Consensus Layer Will Attempt to Decouple Block Availability from Finality: The goal is to achieve second-level finality (1–2 rounds of voting), while significantly reducing the burden on validators and light clients through state redesign (coexistence of dynamic state and new scalable state types).

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

Ultimately, Ethereum is no longer making "short-term TPS" or "L2 compatibility" the sole narrative focus. Instead, it is re-emphasizing the protocol's foundational attribute as a "long-term trusted infrastructure," which naturally includes verifiability, censorship resistance, quantum resistance, privacy friendliness, and light-weight verification. This marks a major shift for Ethereum in the next 10 years, moving from "engineering iteration" back to "fundamental principles."

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

Previously, discussions around ETH Staking mainly revolved around APR and DeFi composite yields. However, under the traditional 0x01 model, each validator has an effective balance cap of 32 ETH. Consensus layer rewards exceeding 32 ETH are periodically swept out and no longer participate in staking.

This means that for small stakers with only one or a few validators, they are inherently at a disadvantage in compounding efficiency. They must wait for their rewards to accumulate back to 32 ETH before they can launch a new validator and earn staking yields again; large service providers, on the other hand, can aggregate rewards from many validators to quickly start new nodes.

Therefore, Pectra introduced the 0x02 model, raising the maximum effective balance for a single validator to 2048 ETH and allowing rewards to continue participating in staking in increments of 1 ETH. This lowers the barrier for small stakers to achieve compounding, narrows the capital efficiency gap between participants of different sizes, while also reducing redundant validators and the operational burden on the network.

Of course, it cannot be simply equated to "a more dispersed number of validators." More accurately, 0x02 improves the operational efficiency of the validator set at the protocol level and also enhances the capital efficiency and relative standing of small stakers, allowing participants of all sizes to access native protocol yields with lower friction.

This is not separate from the direction of Lean Ethereum. Both emphasize the same thing—maintaining an Ethereum that can operate long-term with less redundancy and friction.

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

From the EF scaling down, to the emergence of independent organizations like Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional; from prioritizing scaling to Lean Ethereum re-emphasizing protocol simplification, quantum resistance, privacy, and light verification; and to 0x02 validators transforming staking rewards from periodic sweeps into a native, sustainable compounding income stream—these changes are not isolated from each other.

They all perform a similar kind of subtraction: reducing Ethereum's dependence on a single organization, reducing the cost for ordinary participants to verify the protocol, and reducing the idle capital and redundant overhead in the staking process.

Correspondingly, what Ethereum hopes to gain is a more distributed system of responsibility, a base protocol that is easier to verify independently, and an income structure more suitable for long-term holders and network security participants.

These changes are unlikely to become an immediate price catalyst.

After all, Lean Ethereum will take three to four years or even longer to be gradually implemented. The new organizational structure needs to prove that multi-node collaboration won't lead to directional fragmentation. The compounding advantage of 0x02 validators will also need a full cycle to become fully apparent.

But perhaps what Ethereum really needs to prove in its next phase isn't just how many more upgrades it can complete.

More importantly, as the value it secures grows and the external environment becomes more complex, can it become less reliant on any single organization, easier to verify on ordinary devices, and provide capital participating in network security with more stable and sustainable long-term returns?

So-called "Lean" is not about making Ethereum smaller, but about putting the things truly needed for the next several decades back at the center of the protocol.