Vitalik: Ethereum to Complete Major Third Iteration in Next 5 Years, Quantum Resistance and Privacy as Primary Goals

On July 5, Vitalik Buterin announced that Ethereum researchers finalized the 'Streamlined Ethereum' roadmap during a conference in Berlin. This is not a one-time upgrade but a series of forks over the next 3 to 4 years (starting from 'I-star'), which will mark the third major era of Ethereum, almost replacing all core components. Core changes include: verification shifting from direct execution to recursive STARK; consensus introducing 1-2 rounds of finality for faster and safer transactions; multi-dimensional Gas pricing; and a complete replacement of existing solutions with quantum-resistant cryptography. The most disruptive change is the state model—current dynamic states only expand to about 2TB, while introducing new scalable states like UTXO and circular buffers, with a total scale reaching up to 100TB, suitable for ERC20/NFT/DeFi, potentially reducing transaction fees by over 10 times after the rewrite; complex applications (like Uniswap pools) will retain the old state without mandatory migration. However, the issue of who will store the 100TB state and the associated incentives has become a new focus of research. Privacy upgrades are now a primary design goal, with all new components needing to support quantum-resistant, intermediary-free privacy transactions. Formal verification will be fully implemented, and there is exploration into introducing RISC-V or leanISA as the underlying VM for the protocol, with EVM potentially becoming a feature at the compilation layer in the future. In terms of scalability metrics, Gas limits, Blob capacity, and block times will be increased multiple times over the next 5 years, with the Glasterdam fork set to significantly raise Gas limits first. In the order of forks, H-star (Hegota) will be the last 'pre-streamlined' fork, after which Ethereum will fully enter the streamlined era. Through this complex yet smooth transition, Ethereum is moving towards a quantum-resistant, massively scalable, privacy-first new network while maximizing the protection of existing applications. This cautious disruption over the next five years has officially begun.