Lean – Earlybirds Invest

Fort mode and beast mode

Drake’s security thesis highlights that Ethereum must run for decades, even centuries, under adversarial conditions.

According to the roadmap, “if the internet is up, Ethereum is up” is the goal. On performance, Lean Ethereum targets roughly 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) on mainnet via aggressive vertical scaling and approximately 1 million TPS on layer-2 (L2) blockchains via expansive horizontal scaling.

He added that enabling “moon-math” is no longer aspirational, suggesting real-time zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) for execution and data availability sampling (DAS) for data throughput.

A complementary usability aim is full-chain verification on consumer devices, such as browsers, phones, and wallets.

Three “lean” sublayers

Lean Ethereum proposes coordinated upgrades across three different layers. The first is “Lean consensus,” or Beacon Chain 2.0, focused on hardening the Beacon Chain for maximum security and decentralization, with near-instant finality measured in seconds.

Lean data (Blobs 2.0) is the second layer. The goal is to enable post-quantum “blobs” with granular sizing to preserve a calldata-like developer experience while boosting throughput.

Lastly, Lean execution (EVM 2.0) consists of a minimal, SNARK-friendly instruction set that preserves EVM compatibility and network effects but accelerates proving and verification.

Together, these changes aim to deliver “performance abundance” under non-negotiable continuity and simplicity constraints.

Hash-based crypto as the standard fabric

Lean Ethereum treats the hash function as the fundamental primitive across layers. Aggregate signatures in consensus supplanting Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS), hash-based commitments replacing Kate, Zaverucha, and Goldberg (KZG) in the data layer, and hash-centric zkVMs streamlining execution verification.

The approach is designed to simultaneously future-proof against quantum adversaries while harmonizing with the rapid rise of SNARKs across the stack.

Drake said that Lean Ethereum is as much an engineering aesthetic as a roadmap. The concept is based on minimal modules, encapsulated complexity, formal verification, and provable security and optimality.

The emphasis on “lean craft” seeks to prune legacy complexity while standardizing on primitives that are easier to reason and verify.

Mentioned in this article

Ethereum builders outlined a “Lean Ethereum” roadmap that aims to trim layer-1 complexity while hardening security, according to researcher Thomas Coratger on June 12 via X.

Co-founder Vitalik Buterin and researcher Justin Drake discussed the concept in a breakout session at the Forschungsingenieurtagung conference in Berlin. It proposes three guiding targets: security, simplicity, and optimality.

‘Lean Ethereum’

Coratger wrote that the roadmap calls for post-quantum-ready signatures and reworked data availability to guard the ledger against future cryptographic threats.

He added that simplicity would come from slimming consensus, execution, and data layers so new contributors can audit code without steep learning curves. Optimality aims to achieve lower latency and overhead, keeping Ethereum competitive while maintaining its decentralization.

Buterin illustrated the effort with four research tracks already under review. The first is a three-step-finality (3SF) protocol that delivers rapid block finality in a compact codebase, while the second is aggregated post-quantum signatures.

A third research track focuses on zero-knowledge virtual machines that enable verifiable execution, with a data-layer refactor that merges blobs through erasure coding, rounding up the tracks.

Drake connected those tracks to existing strategy items, including user-experience upgrades, scalability work, and full-chain sampling.

The ‘Lean’ banner

Furthermore, Drake laid out several near-term proposals under the “lean” banner, including lean staking, which would strip validator duties to the essentials.

Lean verifiability would let low-power devices confirm blocks with modest bandwidth. A lean crypto approach would reduce the protocol’s reliance on multiple primitives, favoring a single hash function and post-quantum schemes wherever possible.

He also promoted “lean specs,” breaking logic into small modules, and “lean formal verification,” starting with zk-VMs and signature aggregation.

Coratger noted the alignment between these ideas and active engineering work, such as Fork-Choice enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL), zkEVM pilots, and beam roadmap prototypes.

He reported that session participants acknowledged the difficulty of achieving optimality but viewed the payoff as worthwhile, especially as rollups and centralized sequencers reshape Layer 2 processing.

Foundation response

Ethereum Foundation co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak described Drake’s presentation as a forward-looking synthesis of current projects and longer-range research.

Stanczak wrote that many ideas will proceed to testing while others will evolve, calling the roadmap an “unifying theory” rather than an immediate directive. He added that the talk motivated contributors by tying today’s milestones to a broader technical horizon.

Yet, Lean Ethereum remains a research framework without a scheduled hard fork proposal. Core teams plan to refine design documents, prototype features such as mini-3SF, and evaluate trade-offs in working group calls.