The Ethereum Foundation (EF) shared a vision for the next 10 years of protocol development on Thursday, and it has a name: “lean Ethereum.”
The lean Ethereum vision, unveiled in a blog post from longtime EF senior researcher Justin Drake, presents a gung-ho vision for how to scale Ethereum’s capacity over the next decade while maintaining its 100% uptime and resisting threats like quantum computing and state-level censorship.
“Ethereum is poised to become the bedrock of the internet of value, securing hundreds of trillions over decades, even centuries, Drake wrote. “Ethereum must survive anything…If the internet is up, Ethereum is up.”
Drake’s post sets ambitious goals for Ethereum’s transaction capability, with a goal of handling one billion gas per second and 10,000 TPS on the base layer, and one trillion gas per second and one million TPS across Ethereum’s Layer 2 networks. For context, Ethereum’s current behavior — around 12 seconds between blocks, and a gas limit of about 45 million — puts the current maximum gas-per-second at around 3.75 million, and most blocks aren’t filled to the max.
To get there, Drake details “bold upgrades across all three L1 sublayers”— a rebranding of Drake’s Beam Chain to “Beacon Chain 2.0,” targeting the consensus layer, post-quantum blobs 2.0 to target the data layer, and EVM 2.0, which will possibly be built with the open-source RISC-V instruction set, to boost performance at the execution layer.
“The goal: performance abundance under the constraint of non-negotiable continuity, maximum hardness, and refreshing simplicity,” Drake wrote.
Drake’s vision for Ethereum’s cryptography involves relying exclusively on hash-based signatures, hash-rooted data commitments, and hash-native zk-VMs, allowing for quantum resistance without burdening the execution layer.
The lean Ethereum vision is not just a blueprint, but also an aesthetic, according to Drake. “Minimalism. Modularity. Encapsulated complexity. Formal verification. Provable security. Provable optimality. These are subtle yet important technical considerations,” the post states. “An art form. A craft. Think Jiro in Dreams of Sushi.”
Ethereum celebrated its tenth anniversary on July 30 as the world’s second most valuable blockchain network by market capitalization. The Ethereum Foundation has undergone significant changes in recent months, including appointing two new co-directors, EF researcher Hsiao-Wei Wang and Nethermind founder Tomasz Stanczak.
In the post, which was shared by the Ethereum Foundation on X, Drake acknowledges the ideological diversity of the Ethereum ecosystem. “A healthy diversity of views across Protocol, the EF, and the broader Ethereum community is expected and welcome,” he wrote. Drake also shared a roadmap to track lean Ethereum development.
© 2025 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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