Vitalik: In the next 5 years, Ethereum will enter an era of simplification, with quantum resistance and privacy as primary goals

Odaily Planet Daily reports that Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform, stating that Ethereum researchers recently finalized the "Simplify Ethereum" roadmap at a Berlin conference. 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. Core changes include shifting verification from direct execution to recursive STARKs, introducing 1 to 2 rounds of finality in consensus, multi-dimensional gas pricing, and completely replacing existing solutions with quantum-resistant cryptography. Regarding the state model, the existing dynamic state only scales to about 2TB, while new scalable states such as UTXO and ring buffers are introduced, with a total scale reaching 100TB, suitable for ERC20, NFTs, and DeFi. After the rewrite, transaction fees could be reduced by more than 10 times; complex applications like Uniswap pools will retain the old state without mandatory migration. Privacy will be upgraded 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 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 5 years, with the Glasterdam fork being the first to raise the gas limit. In terms of fork order, H-star Hegota will be the last "pre-simplification" fork, after which the era of simplification will begin.