Vitalik: In the Next 5 Years, Ethereum Will Enter an Era of Streamlining, with Quantum Resistance and Privacy as Top Priorities

Odaily星球日报讯 Vitalik Buterin posted on platform X stating that Ethereum researchers recently finalized the "Ethereum Simplification" roadmap at a Berlin meeting. This roadmap is not a single upgrade but a series of forks lasting 3 to 4 years. Starting from "I-star," it will become the third major phase of Ethereum and replace most core components. Core changes include verifying a shift from direct execution to recursive STARKs, introducing 1 to 2 rounds of finality in consensus, multidimensional gas pricing, and a complete replacement of existing schemes with quantum-resistant cryptography. Regarding the state model, the current dynamic state will only expand to about 2TB, while introducing new scalable states such as UTXO and ring buffers, with a total scale reaching 100TB, applicable to ERC20, NFTs, and DeFi. After the rewrite, transaction fees could be reduced by more than 10 times. Complex applications like Uniswap pools will retain their old state without mandatory migration. Privacy will be upgraded to a first-class design goal, with all new components required to support quantum-resistant, trustless private transactions. Formal verification will be fully implemented, and the exploration to introduce RISC-V or leanISA as the protocol's underlying VM will proceed; EVM may become a compilation layer feature in the future. Gas limits, Blob capacity, and block times will be increased multiple times over the next five years, with the Glasterdam fork first raising the Gas limit. Regarding the fork order, H-star Hegota will be the last "pre-simplification" fork, after which the era of streamlining will begin.