One Year Later, "Lean Ethereum" Sets Out Again: What Answer Does Ethereum Aim to Deliver?
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One Year Later, "Lean Ethereum" Sets Out Again: What Answer Does Ethereum Aim to Deliver?
From organizational division of labor, the protocol underlying layer, to the staking yield model, Ethereum is once again "doing subtraction" for the next decade.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy: imToken
Over the past few years, most of Ethereum's upgrades can be explained by a relatively clear goal: scaling.
From Rollups, Blobs, and data availability, to continuously raising the Gas Limit, the discussions are all about how to enable Ethereum to carry more transactions and reduce costs. Therefore, even if ordinary users do not understand every EIP, they can intuitively understand that these upgrades are ultimately to make the chain faster and cheaper.
But recently, Ethereum has begun to frequently discuss some issues that are not so easily priced by the market. Especially on July 4, Vitalik Buterin, based on the updated long-term Ethereum roadmap, summarized the core direction of Lean Ethereum anew and called it Ethereum's "third major iteration" after The Merge.
At the same time, another study on 0x02 compounding validators also provided a supplementary clue from the perspective of staking yields: for smaller-scale stakers, the native compounding mechanism may bring a relative increase of about 5% in consensus layer APR.
On the surface, these are different topics, but if put together, it becomes apparent that Ethereum may be undergoing a deeper narrative reconstruction: it is beginning to rethink how to support operations for the next decade or even longer through a more decentralized organizational structure, a more easily verifiable protocol foundation, and a more sustainable yield model.
I. From "One Foundation" to Multiple Responsibility Nodes
For a long time in the past, the outside world was accustomed to equating the Ethereum Foundation (EF) with Ethereum itself.
Whether protocol upgrades, research directions, ecosystem funding, or external communication, many questions ultimately boil down to one sentence: What is EF preparing to do?
But as everyone knows, the Ethereum Foundation is not an ordinary company. It has no shareholders in the traditional sense, does not target market share and quarterly profits, and does not "actually own" the Ethereum network, which also leaves EF facing an inherent tension.
On one hand, Ethereum needs someone to invest long-term in protocol R&D, organizational upgrades, and public goods construction; on the other hand, if R&D, funding, talent, and decision-making are increasingly concentrated within the foundation, then EF itself will become Ethereum's largest source of centralization risk.
But recent organizational changes are intentionally breaking this perception. In the latest round of adjustments, EF is reducing its staff size by about 20% on one hand, and refocusing internal work on different levels such as protocol, users, and institutions on the other. According to EF's description of itself, it is to become "leaner and more focused," prioritizing core tasks that only the foundation can and must undertake.
At the same time, some capabilities originally concentrated within EF are beginning to shift to external independent organizations, as mentioned in the previous article (Further Reading "From "One Foundation" to "Multi-Node Governance": Is Ethereum Undergoing a Silent Power Restructuring?"):
- On June 22, five former core researchers of the Ethereum Foundation announced the establishment of Ethlabs, as an independently operated non-profit R&D laboratory, undertaking protocol research, infrastructure, and institutional-level technical needs;
- On July 1, another independent non-profit organization, Ethereum Institutional, officially launched, taking over the institutional cooperation work previously responsible by the EF business development team, becoming an independent docking window for traditional financial institutions to enter the Ethereum ecosystem;
The two correspond to technical R&D and institutional adoption respectively, forming a new specialized division of labor, and also marking that Ethereum is attempting to split the research, ecosystem, and market functions previously concentrated in one organization among multiple relatively independent responsibility nodes—where EF focuses more on the protocol foundation and self-sovereignty, Ethlabs drives long-term R&D, Ethereum Institutional is responsible for institutional communication, and other organizations continue to undertake education, developer support, and application implementation.
From an organizational structure perspective, this model will undoubtedly increase coordination costs. After all, the funding sources, priorities, and execution rhythms of different institutions are not exactly the same, and route divergences or even resource competition may occur in the future.
But from another perspective, if a decentralized protocol relies on a certain foundation to complete almost all key work for a long time, this itself is also a structural risk.
Therefore, the changes at the Ethereum organizational level do not truly answer "who will replace EF," but rather whether Ethereum can establish a collaborative structure where core work can still be undertaken by other nodes even if a certain organization shrinks, pivots, or even disappears.
This "subtraction at the organizational layer" also sets the stage for the upcoming protocol shift.
II. The Shift in Technical Narrative: What Exactly Does Lean Ethereum Want to Do?
Strictly speaking, Lean Ethereum is not a concept that appeared for the first time last week.
As early as July 2025, Ethereum Foundation (EF) researcher Justin Drake released a "lean Ethereum" development vision for the next ten years, proposing directions such as Lean Consensus, Lean Execution, and Lean Data. The main goals include scaling the base layer TPS to 10,000 transactions per second, L2 networks to 10 million, while maintaining decentralization and 100% uptime.
At that time, it was already clear that Ethereum would also undergo major upgrades at the consensus layer, data layer, and execution layer, including upgrading the Beacon Chain to version 2.0, introducing post-quantum era blobs 2.0, and possibly EVM 2.0 built based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set; in terms of cryptography, the system will rely entirely on hash-based signatures, hash root data commitments, and native hash zero-knowledge virtual machines to achieve quantum-resistant computing capabilities.
Therefore, the truly important change this week lies in the fact that Vitalik, based on the latest strawmap, has elevated these scattered research directions to a clearer position—Lean Ethereum is not a single hard fork, but a series of transformations gradually launched over the next three to four years, and also what he defines as Ethereum's "third major iteration."
According to Vitalik's summary, Lean Ethereum involves almost all core parts of the protocol, reflected in several directions:
- Protocol Simplification, shifting from "heavy execution" to "light verification": Using recursive STARKs as core, native components, replacing direct transaction re-execution with proof verification, while client architecture, state models, and multi-dimensional Gas will be adjusted accordingly, aiming to make the protocol itself leaner and more formally verifiable;
- Quantum Resistance Priority: Quantum safety has been significantly advanced from a "long-term consideration"; existing cryptographic components vulnerable to quantum computing threats will be gradually replaced with quantum-resistant solutions, and quantum-safe design for blobs is also listed as an urgent matter;
- Privacy is no longer viewed as a function requiring additional supplementation at the application layer, but will become a first-class goal in protocol design: No longer a post-hoc patch, but a native protocol capability. New Frames, mempool, and state tree designs will support quantum-safe, intermediary-free private transactions;
- The consensus layer will attempt to decouple block availability and finality: The goal is to achieve second-level finality (1–2 rounds of voting), while significantly reducing the burden on validators and light clients through state redesign (coexistence of dynamic state and new scalable state types);
These directions look very complex, but behind them lies a common logic, which is to concentrate computation and complexity on a few nodes responsible for generating proofs, allowing more participants to verify results at a lower cost.
Ultimately, Ethereum is no longer taking "short-term TPS" or "L2 compatibility" as the sole narrative axis, but is re-emphasizing the underlying attributes of the protocol as "long-term trusted infrastructure," which naturally includes verifiability, censorship resistance, quantum resistance, privacy friendliness, and light verification. This is also Ethereum's major shift from "engineering iteration" to "return to principles" in the next 10 years.
In this context, 0x02 compounding validators also reflect a similar long-term perspective.
In the past, discussions on ETH Staking mainly revolved around APR and DeFi compound yields, but in the traditional 0x01 mode, the effective balance limit for each validator is 32 ETH, and consensus layer rewards exceeding 32 ETH are regularly transferred out and no longer continue to participate in staking.
Then for small stakers with only one or a few validators, needing to wait for rewards to accumulate back to 32 ETH before starting a new validator to gain staking yields again, this is undoubtedly naturally at a disadvantage in compounding efficiency; whereas large service providers can aggregate rewards from a large number of validators and quickly launch new nodes.
Therefore, Pectra introduces the 0x02 mode, increasing the maximum effective balance of a single validator to 2048 ETH, and allowing rewards to continue participating in staking in units of 1 ETH. This can lower the threshold for small stakers to achieve compounding, narrow the capital efficiency gap between participants of different scales, and simultaneously reduce redundant validators and network operation burdens.
Of course, it cannot simply be equated to "a more dispersed number of validators." More accurately, 0x02 on one hand improves the operational efficiency of the validator set at the protocol level, and on the other hand also improves the capital efficiency and relative situation of small stakers, allowing participants of different scales to obtain protocol native yields with lower friction.
And this is not disconnected from the direction of Lean Ethereum; what both emphasize behind the scenes is the same thing—maintaining an Ethereum capable of long-term operation with less redundancy and friction.
III. The Next Decade, What Kind of Ethereum Should We Expect?
From EF scaling down, to the emergence of independent organizations such as Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional; from scaling priority, to Lean Ethereum re-emphasizing protocol simplification, quantum resistance, privacy, and light verification; to 0x02 validators changing staking yields from regular transfer-out to gradually becoming sustainable reinvested native income, these changes are not isolated from each other.
They are all doing similar subtractions, such as reducing Ethereum's reliance on a single organization, reducing the costs ordinary participants need to bear to verify the protocol, and also reducing idle and repeated expenses of staked capital during operation.
Correspondingly, what Ethereum hopes to obtain is a more decentralized responsibility system, an underlying protocol that is easier to verify independently, and a yield structure more suitable for long-term holders and network security participants.
These changes are difficult to become an immediate price catalyst.
After all, Lean Ethereum needs three to four years or even longer to be gradually implemented; the new organizational structure needs to prove that multi-node collaboration will not lead to fragmentation in direction; the compounding advantage of 0x02 validators also needs to go through a complete cycle to fully manifest.
But what Ethereum truly needs to prove in the next phase is perhaps not just how many more upgrades it can complete.
More importantly, when the value carried by the protocol becomes higher and higher and the external environment becomes more and more complex, whether it can become less reliant on a certain organization, easier to be verified by ordinary devices, and also allow capital participating in network security to obtain more stable, more sustainable long-term returns.
The so-called Lean is not about making Ethereum smaller, but about putting the things that truly need to remain for the next few decades back into the center of the protocol.
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