时隔หนึ่งปี，「Lean Ethereum」กลับมา出发อีกครั้ง：以太坊想要交出什么答案？

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 frequently discussing issues that are not so easily priced by the market. Notably, on July 4th, Vitalik Buterin, based on an updated long-term Ethereum roadmap, summarized the core direction of Lean Ethereum and called it Ethereum's "third major iteration" following The Merge.

Simultaneously, another study on 0x02 compounding validators provided a supplementary clue from the perspective of staking yields. For smaller stakers, the native compounding mechanism could lead to an approximate 5% relative increase in consensus layer APR.

On the surface, these seem like different topics. But when pieced together, they reveal a potentially deeper narrative reconstruction Ethereum is undergoing: it is beginning to rethink how to support its operations for the next decade or longer through a more decentralized organizational structure, an easier-to-verify protocol foundation, and a more sustainable yield model.

1. From a 'Single Foundation' to Multiple Nodes of Responsibility

For a long time, the outside world habitually equated the Ethereum Foundation (EF) with Ethereum itself.

Whether it was protocol upgrades, research directions, ecosystem funding, or external communications, many questions ultimately boiled down to one: What is the EF planning to do?

But as we all know, the Ethereum Foundation is not an ordinary company. It has no traditional shareholders, doesn't aim for market share or quarterly profits, and doesn't "actually own" the Ethereum network. This has always created an inherent tension for the EF.

On one hand, Ethereum needs people to invest long-term in protocol research, organize upgrades, and build public goods. On the other hand, if R&D, funding, talent, and decision-making become increasingly concentrated within the foundation, the EF itself becomes the biggest source of centralization risk for Ethereum.

However, recent organizational changes are consciously breaking this perception. In the latest round of adjustments, the EF, on one hand, reduced its staff size by about 20%, and on the other, refocused its internal work on different levels like the protocol, users, and institutions. According to the EF's own description, this is to become "leaner and more focused," prioritizing the core tasks only it can and must undertake.

At the same time, some capabilities once concentrated within the EF are beginning to transfer to external independent organizations. As detailed in a previous article (see From a 'Single Foundation' to 'Multi-Node Governance': Is Ethereum Undergoing a Silent Power Restructuring?):

• On June 22nd, five former Ethereum Foundation core researchers announced the formation of Ethlabs, an independent non-profit R&D lab to take on protocol research, infrastructure, and institutional-level technical needs.
• On July 1st, another independent non-profit, Ethereum Institutional, officially launched. It took over the institutional partnership work previously handled by the EF's ecosystem growth team, becoming an independent point of contact for traditional financial institutions entering the Ethereum ecosystem.

These two entities correspond to technical R&D and institutional adoption respectively, creating a new specialized division of labor. This also marks Ethereum's attempt to decouple the research, ecosystem, and market functions previously centralized in one organization, distributing them among several relatively independent nodes of responsibility—where the EF focuses more on the protocol's core and self-sovereignty, Ethlabs drives long-term R&D, Ethereum Institutional handles institutional communication, and other organizations continue to support education, developer relations, and application deployment.

From an organizational structure perspective, this model will undoubtedly increase coordination costs. After all, different institutions may have varying sources of funding, priorities, and execution rhythms, potentially leading to future divergences in direction or even resource competition.

But looking at it from the other 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 answer from Ethereum's organizational changes isn't "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 sets the stage for the upcoming protocol shift.

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

Strictly speaking, Lean Ethereum isn't a concept that appeared just last week.

As early as July 2025, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake outlined a ten-year "lean Ethereum" development vision, proposing directions like Lean Consensus, Lean Execution, and Lean Data. The main goals included scaling the base layer TPS to ten thousand transactions per second, expanding L2 networks to ten million transactions per second, while maintaining decentralization and 100% uptime.

Even back then, it was clear that Ethereum planned significant upgrades to the consensus layer, data layer, and execution layer, including upgrading the Beacon Chain to version 2.0, introducing post-quantum blobs 2.0, and potentially an 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-based data commitments, and a native hash-based zero-knowledge virtual machine for quantum resistance.

So, the truly important change this week is that Vitalik, based on the latest strawman roadmap, has elevated these disparate research areas to a more prominent position. Lean Ethereum is not a single hard fork, but a series of transformations rolled out over the next three to four years, defining what he calls Ethereum's "third major iteration."

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

• Protocol Simplification, shifting from "heavy execution" to "lightweight verification": This involves using recursive STARKs as a core, native component, replacing direct transaction re-execution with proof verification. Client architecture, the state model, and the multi-dimensional Gas model will all be adjusted accordingly, aiming for a leaner, more formally verifiable protocol.
• Quantum Resistance Priority: Quantum security is being significantly moved up from a "long-term consideration." Existing cryptographic components vulnerable to quantum computing attacks will be gradually replaced with quantum-resistant alternatives. The quantum-safe design of blobs is also listed as an urgent priority.
• Privacy as a First-Class Goal: No longer viewed as an application-layer add-on, privacy will become a primary objective in protocol design. It won't be an afterthought patch, but a native protocol capability. New Frames, mempool, and state tree designs will support quantum-safe, trust-minimized private transactions.
• Decoupling Block Availability and Finality in the Consensus Layer: The goal is to achieve sub-second finality (1-2 rounds of voting), while significantly reducing the burden on validators and light clients through state redesign (coexisting dynamic state with new scalable state types).

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

Ultimately, Ethereum is moving away from making "short-term TPS" or "L2 compatibility" its sole narrative axis, and is instead re-emphasizing the foundational properties of the protocol as a "long-term trusted infrastructure." This naturally includes verifiability, censorship resistance, quantum resistance, privacy-friendliness, and lightweight verification. This marks a significant pivot for Ethereum over the next decade, from "engineering iteration" back to "first principles."

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

Previously, discussions around ETH Staking mainly revolved around APR and DeFi composite yields. However, in the traditional 0x01 model, the effective balance limit per validator is 32 ETH. Consensus layer rewards exceeding 32 ETH were periodically withdrawn and no longer participated in staking.

This meant that for small stakers with only one or a few validators, they were at a natural disadvantage in compounding efficiency. They had to wait for rewards to accumulate back to 32 ETH before they could start a new validator and earn staking rewards again. In contrast, large service providers could aggregate rewards from many validators to quickly launch new nodes.

Therefore, Pectra introduces the 0x02 model, increasing the maximum effective balance for a single validator to 2048 ETH and allowing rewards to be restaked 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, and simultaneously reduces the burden of redundant validators and network operations.

Of course, this doesn't simply equate to "more dispersed validator counts." More precisely, 0x02 improves the protocol-level operational efficiency of the validator set while also improving the capital efficiency and relative position of small stakers, allowing participants of different scales to access native protocol yields with lower friction.

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

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

From the EF's downsizing to the emergence of independent organizations like Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional; from prioritizing scaling to Lean Ethereum's renewed focus on protocol simplification, quantum resistance, privacy, and lightweight verification; and from the 0x02 validator model transforming staking rewards from periodic withdrawals into a continuously reinvestable native income stream - these changes are not isolated from each other.

They all involve a similar kind of subtraction: reducing Ethereum's reliance on a single organization, lowering the cost for ordinary participants to verify the protocol, and decreasing idle capital and redundant overhead in the operation of staked funds.

Correspondingly, what Ethereum seeks in return is a more dispersed responsibility system, a base protocol that is easier to independently verify, 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 fragmentation. The compounding advantage for 0x02 validators will also need a full cycle to become fully apparent.

But what Ethereum truly needs to prove in its next phase is perhaps not just how many more upgrades it can accomplish.

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

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