rewrite this title and make it good for SEO Vitalik Buterin Says Ethereum’s Next Rebuild Will Rival The Merge, Take Three to Four Years – NFT Plazas

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined an updated long-term roadmap for the network, describing the multi-year “Lean Ethereum” initiative as the protocol’s biggest overhaul since the 2022 Merge. The update follows a gathering of Ethereum researchers in Berlin in late June and comes alongside a revised draft roadmap, known internally as the “strawmap,” published at strawmap.org.

Third Major Iteration

Buterin shared his takeaways in a post on X on Saturday, July 4, 2026. He described Lean Ethereum as not being a single one-shot upgrade but rather a series of improvements arriving over three or four years, while still calling it the third major iteration of Ethereum, on par with the Merge. The first iteration was Ethereum’s launch itself, while the second was the 2022 transition from mining to a stake-based validation system.

Buterin said the changes are designed to touch nearly every layer of the protocol while keeping disruption to existing applications low, pointing to the smooth execution of the Merge as evidence the network can pull off large-scale upgrades without breaking what already runs on top of it

Vitalik Buterin Says Ethereum’s Next Rebuild Will Rival The Merge

Quantum Safety Moves to the Top of the List

One of the clearest shifts in priority is around quantum resistance. Reigning theories hold that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could eventually break the cryptography securing blockchains today, a risk the industry increasingly treats as worth preparing for even though it likely remains years away. Buterin said replacing every quantum-vulnerable component, including the cheap data storage that layer-2 rollups depend on, is now treated as urgent rather than theoretical, with work on quantum-resistant “blobs” already months underway. 

Privacy Becomes a “First-Class Goal”

Privacy has also been elevated. Buterin wrote that privacy is no longer an afterthought but a first-class protocol goal, according to Decrypt’s reporting on his post. Under the plan, components such as the mempool and the state tree would be designed so that private, intermediary-free transactions can pass through them by default, rather than relying on third-party privacy applications layered on top.

The Most Disruptive Change: How Ethereum Stores Data

Buterin flagged Ethereum’s “state” — the running record of account balances, token ledgers, and smart contract data — as the single most disruptive part of the plan. Every node must store and continually update this record to validate transactions, and as usage grows, that becomes more expensive to run, pushing the network toward fewer, larger operators and away from decentralization.

The proposal keeps today’s flexible “dynamic” state largely intact but allows it to grow only moderately, while introducing a new, cheaper, more restrictive tier for simpler use cases. According to The Block, Buterin illustrated a possible 2030 network where the new storage tier holds roughly 50 times more data than the current format, while other outlets cited a scenario of about 2 terabytes of legacy dynamic state alongside more than 100 terabytes on the new tier. Most ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, and everyday DeFi applications could migrate to the cheaper tier, cutting fees by more than tenfold, while complex protocols such as decentralized exchanges would likely remain on the existing system. Migration would reportedly be optional rather than mandatory.

Verification, Consensus, and a Possible Move Beyond the EVM

Rather than having every node re-execute every transaction, Ethereum plans to rely on recursive STARKs — a zero-knowledge proof method that lets nodes verify a compact proof that work was done correctly. Buterin wants this “enshrined” as a core protocol component, according to Decrypt. He also floated simplified consensus with one- or two-round finality and multidimensional gas pricing.

Longer term, Buterin suggested Ethereum may need a virtual machine beyond the EVM, naming RISC-V and leanISA as leading candidates. His stated preference is for the EVM to eventually become a higher-level compiler target while the protocol runs on a simpler underlying base — though he cautioned this shift remains far off.

Ethereum (ETH) Price Performance on 06/7/2026 (Source: CoinMarketCap)

Timeline and Institutional Backdrop

Buterin pointed to the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade as delivering a large near-term capacity increase, and said the fork that follows, Hegotá, is likely to be Ethereum’s last before the “Lean” era formally begins.

The roadmap arrived shortly after the Ethereum Foundation completed a major restructuring, cutting roughly 54 staff positions — about 20% of its workforce — and reducing its budget by around 40%. Several departed researchers have since regrouped at EthLabs, a newly launched nonprofit backed by ETH treasury holders Bitmine and SharpLink, focused on scalability, interoperability, and infrastructure for tokenized assets, stablecoins, and DeFi.

Buterin closed his thread by describing Ethereum as “CROPS” — shorthand for censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security — framing these as the values that should anchor the network’s narrowed focus going forward

As of publication, ETH was trading in the $1,780 range, up modestly on the day, as markets continue to weigh the long-term implications of what Buterin has called Ethereum’s most ambitious rebuild since the Merge.