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

According to Odaily, Vitalik Buterin stated on X that Ethereum researchers recently finalized the "Ethereum Simplification" roadmap at a meeting in Berlin. 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 transitioning execution from direct execution to recursive STARKs, introducing 1 to 2 rounds of finality into consensus, multi-dimensional gas pricing, and fully replacing existing solutions with quantum-resistant cryptography. Regarding the state model, the current dynamic state will only expand to about 2TB, while new scalable state models such as UTXO and ring buffers will be introduced, reaching a total size of 100TB, suitable for ERC20, NFTs, and DeFi. After rewriting, transaction fees could be reduced by over 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 resistance and intermediary-free private transactions. Formal verification will be fully implemented, and the introduction of RISC-V or leanISA as the protocol's underlying VM will be explored, with the EVM potentially becoming a compilation layer feature in the future. Gas limits, blob capacity, and block times will be increased multiple times over the next five years. The Glasterdam fork will take the lead in raising gas limits. Regarding the fork sequence, H-star Hegota will be the last "pre-simplification" fork, after which the simplification era begins.