By: imToken
Over the past few years, most of Ethereum's upgrades could be explained by a relatively clear goal: scaling.
From Rollup, Blob, and data availability to the continuous increase in the Gas Limit, the discussions have all been about how to enable Ethereum to handle more transactions and reduce costs. Therefore, even if ordinary users don't understand every EIP, they can intuitively grasp that these upgrades ultimately aim to make the chain faster and cheaper.
However, recently, Ethereum has begun to frequently discuss issues that are less easily priced by the market. Especially on July 4th, Vitalik Buterin, based on the updated long-term roadmap for Ethereum, re-summarized the core directions of Lean Ethereum, calling it the "third major iteration" of Ethereum after The Merge.
At the same time, another piece of research on 0x02 compounding validators provided a supplementary clue from the perspective of staking rewards. For smaller-scale stakers, a native compounding mechanism could bring about a 5% relative increase in the consensus layer APR.
On the surface, these are different topics, but when placed together, one might find that Ethereum is undergoing a deeper narrative reconstruction: it is starting to reconsider, how to support its operation over the next decade or even longer through a more decentralized organizational structure, a protocol base that is easier to verify, and a more sustainable revenue model.
I. From 'One Foundation' to Multiple Responsibility Nodes
For a long time in the past, the outside world has been accustomed to equating the Ethereum Foundation (EF) with Ethereum itself.
Whether it's protocol upgrades, research directions, ecosystem funding, or external communication, many questions ultimately boil down to one phrase: What does EF plan to do?
But as is well known, the Ethereum Foundation is not an ordinary company. It does not have traditional shareholders, does not use market share and quarterly profits as its goals, and does not "actually own" the Ethereum network. This has also left EF facing an inherent tension.
On one hand, Ethereum needs long-term commitment to protocol R&D, organizing upgrades, and public goods construction. On the other hand, if research, funding, talent, and decision-making become increasingly concentrated within the foundation, then EF itself would become Ethereum's biggest centralization risk source.
But recent organizational changes are intentionally breaking this perception. In the latest round of adjustments, EF reduced its personnel by approximately 20% on one hand, while refocusing internal work on different levels such as protocol, users, and institutions. According to EF's self-description, it is to become "leaner and more focused," prioritizing core tasks that only the foundation can and must undertake.
Meanwhile, some capabilities previously concentrated within EF are starting to shift to external independent organizations, as discussed in the previous article (extended reading: 'From "One Foundation" to "Multi-Node Governance": Is Ethereum Undergoing a Silent Power Restructuring?'):
- On June 22nd, five former core researchers from the Ethereum Foundation announced the establishment of Ethlabs, an independently operated non-profit R&D lab, taking on protocol research, infrastructure, and institutional-level technical needs;
- On July 1st, another independent non-profit organization, Ethereum Institutional, officially launched, taking over the institutional cooperation work previously handled by EF's business development team, becoming an independent contact window for traditional financial institutions entering the Ethereum ecosystem;
These two respectively correspond to technical R&D and institutional adoption, forming a new specialization division of labor. It also marks that Ethereum is attempting to split the research, ecosystem, and market functions previously concentrated in one organization among multiple relatively independent responsibility nodes—with EF focusing more on the protocol base and self-sovereignty, Ethlabs driving long-term R&D, Ethereum Institutional handling institutional communication, and other organizations continuing to undertake education, developer support, and application deployment.
From an organizational structure perspective, this model will undoubtedly increase coordination costs. After all, different organizations have different funding sources, priorities, and execution rhythms, and future disagreements on roadmaps or even resource competition may arise.
But on the other hand, if a decentralized protocol relies long-term on a single foundation to handle almost all key work, that in itself is a structural risk.
Therefore, the changes at the Ethereum organizational level are not truly answering "who will replace EF," but rather whether Ethereum can establish a collaborative structure where, even if one organization scales down, pivots, or disappears, core work can still be taken over by other nodes.
This "organizational subtraction" also sets the stage for the upcoming protocol shift.
II. The Turn in Technical Narrative: What Exactly Is Lean Ethereum Trying to Do?
Strictly speaking, Lean Ethereum is not a concept that first appeared last week.
As early as July 2025, EF researcher Justin Drake released a vision for "lean Ethereum" development over the next decade, proposing directions such as Lean Consensus, Lean Execution, and Lean Data. The main goals included scaling the base layer TPS to 10,000 transactions per second, L2 networks to 10 million, while maintaining decentralization and 100% uptime.
It was already clear then that Ethereum would undergo major upgrades in 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 potentially an EVM 2.0 based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set; in terms of cryptography, the system would fully rely on hash-based signatures, hash-root data commitments, and a native hash-based zero-knowledge virtual machine to achieve quantum-resistant capabilities.
Therefore, the truly important change this week is that Vitalik, based on the latest strawmap, elevated these scattered research directions to a more defined position—Lean Ethereum is not a single hard fork, but a series of transformations gradually rolled out over the next three to four years, and what he defines as Ethereum's "third major iteration."
According to Vitalik's summary, Lean Ethereum touches almost all core parts of the protocol, reflected in several directions:
- Protocol Simplification, shifting from "Heavy Execution" to "Light Verification": Using recursive STARKs as a core, native component, replacing direct transaction re-execution with proof verification. Client architecture, state model, and Gas multi-dimensionality will be adjusted accordingly. The goal is 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 gradually be replaced with quantum-resistant schemes, and the quantum-safe design of blobs has also been listed as an urgent matter;
- Privacy is no longer seen as a function requiring additional application-layer supplements, but becomes a first-class goal in protocol design: No longer an afterthought 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 from finality: Aiming to achieve second-level finality (1–2 rounds of voting), while significantly reducing the burden on validators and light clients through state redesign (dynamic state coexisting with new scalable state types);
These directions may seem very complex, but they share a common logic: concentrating 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 treating "short-term TPS" or "L2 compatibility" as its only narrative axis, but is re-emphasizing the underlying attributes of the protocol as "long-term trusted infrastructure." This naturally includes verifiability, censorship resistance, quantum resistance, privacy friendliness, and lightweight verification. This is also the massive shift over the next decade for Ethereum, moving from "engineering iteration" back to "principles."
Against this backdrop, 0x02 compounding validators also embodies a similar long-term perspective.
In the past, discussions about ETH Staking mainly revolved around APR and DeFi composite yields. However, under the traditional 0x01 mode, each validator's effective balance cap is 32 ETH. Consensus layer rewards exceeding 32 ETH are periodically withdrawn and no longer continue to participate in staking.
Thus, for small stakers with only one or a few validators, they need to wait for rewards to accumulate back to 32 ETH to activate a new validator and start earning staking rewards again, which naturally places them at a disadvantage in compounding efficiency; whereas large service providers can aggregate rewards from many validators to quickly activate new nodes.
Therefore, Pectra introduces the 0x02 mode, raising the maximum effective balance for a single validator to 2048 ETH and allowing rewards to continue participating in staking in units of 1 ETH. This lowers the threshold for small stakers to achieve compounding, narrowing the capital efficiency gap between participants of different scales while reducing redundant validators and network operational burden.
Of course, it cannot simply be equated to "validator count becoming more dispersed." More accurately, 0x02 improves the operational efficiency of the validator set at the protocol level on one hand, and on the other, enhances the capital efficiency and relative position of small stakers, allowing participants of different scales to obtain protocol-native yields with lower friction.
This is not disconnected from the direction of Lean Ethereum. What they both emphasize is the same thing—maintaining an Ethereum that can operate long-term 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 like Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional; from prioritizing scaling, to Lean Ethereum re-emphasizing protocol simplification, quantum resistance, privacy, and light verification; to 0x02 validators gradually transforming staking rewards from periodic withdrawals into a sustainable, natively reinvested income—these changes are not isolated from each other.
They are all doing similar subtraction: for example, reducing Ethereum's dependence on a single organization, reducing the cost ordinary participants need to bear to verify the protocol, and reducing the idle and redundant overhead of staking capital during operation.
Correspondingly, what Ethereum hopes to achieve is a more decentralized responsibility system, a protocol base that is easier to independently verify, and a revenue structure more suitable for long-term holders and network security participants.
These changes are difficult to become an immediately effective price catalyst.
After all, Lean Ethereum will take three to four years or even longer to be gradually implemented; the new organizational structure needs to prove that multi-node collaboration does not lead to directional fragmentation; the compounding advantages of 0x02 validators also need to go through a full cycle to fully manifest.
But what Ethereum truly needs to prove in its next phase is perhaps not just how many more upgrades it can complete.
More importantly, as the value borne by the protocol increases and the external environment becomes more complex, can it become less dependent on any single organization, easier to verify by ordinary devices, and provide more stable, sustainable long-term returns for capital participating in network security?
What Lean means is not making Ethereum smaller, but putting back at the center of the protocol what will truly be needed for the next several decades.
