Vitalik: Ethereum will enter an era of streamlining in the next 5 years, with quantum resistance and privacy becoming top priorities

Odaily reported that Vitalik Buterin posted on platform X, stating that Ethereum researchers have finalized the "Ethereum Simplification" roadmap during a recent Berlin meeting. This roadmap is not a single upgrade but a series of forks spanning 3 to 4 years. Starting with "I-star," it will become the third major phase of Ethereum and replace most core components. Key changes include the transition of verification from direct execution to recursive STARKs, the introduction of 1 to 2 rounds of finality in consensus, multi-dimensional gas pricing, and a complete replacement of existing schemes with quantum-resistant cryptography. Regarding the state model, the existing dynamic state will only expand to approximately 2TB, while new scalable states such as UTXO and ring buffers will be introduced, reaching a total scale of up to 100TB, suitable for ERC20, NFTs, and DeFi. After rewriting, 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 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 implemented, and the introduction of RISC-V or leanISA as the underlying protocol VM will be explored, with the EVM potentially becoming a compile-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 being the first to raise gas limits. Regarding the fork sequence, H-star Hegota will be the last "pre-simplification" fork, after which the era of streamlining begins.