Over the past few years, most Ethereum upgrades have shared one relatively clear objective: scaling.
From rollups, blobs, and data availability to repeated increases in the gas limit, the discussion has centered on how Ethereum can process more transactions at lower cost. Even users who do not understand every EIP can still see the basic purpose of these upgrades: making the network faster and cheaper.
More recently, however, Ethereum has increasingly turned to issues that markets find harder to price. On July 4, drawing on an updated long-term roadmap for Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin restated the core direction of Lean Ethereum and described it as Ethereum’s “third major iteration” after The Merge.
Meanwhile, another study of 0x02 compounding validators adds a complementary perspective from staking returns: for smaller stakers, native compounding could produce a relative increase of about 5% in consensus-layer APR.
At first glance, these may seem like separate topics. Taken together, however, they point to a deeper reconstruction of Ethereum’s narrative: how can a more decentralized organizational structure, a more easily verifiable protocol, and a more sustainable yield model keep Ethereum running for the next decade and beyond?
1. From a Single Foundation to Multiple Centers of Responsibility
For years, outside observers tended to equate the Ethereum Foundation, or EF, with Ethereum itself.
Whether the issue was protocol upgrades, research priorities, ecosystem funding, or external communication, many discussions ultimately came down to one question: what will EF do?
But EF is not a conventional company. It has no shareholders in the traditional sense, does not pursue market share or quarterly profit, and does not actually own the Ethereum network. This has always created an inherent tension.
On the one hand, Ethereum needs sustained investment in protocol R&D, upgrade coordination, and public-goods development. On the other hand, if research, funding, talent, and decision-making become increasingly concentrated within the Foundation, EF itself could become Ethereum’s greatest centralization risk.
Recent organizational changes appear intended to break with this perception. In its latest restructuring, EF cut its headcount by about 20% and refocused its internal work on the protocol, users, and institutions. In EF’s own words, the aim is to become “leaner and more focused,” prioritizing the core responsibilities that only the Foundation can—and must—take on.
At the same time, some capabilities once concentrated within EF are beginning to move to independent external organizations. As discussed in our previous article, “Beyond the Ethereum Foundation: Is Ethereum Quietly Redistributing Power?”:
On June 22, five former core researchers at EF announced the launch of Ethlabs, an independently operated nonprofit R&D lab taking on protocol research, infrastructure, and institutional-grade technical needs.
On July 1, another independent nonprofit, Ethereum Institutional, officially launched, taking over the institutional partnership work previously handled by EF’s business development team and serving as an independent point of contact for traditional financial institutions entering the Ethereum ecosystem.
Together, the two organizations create a new division of labor between technical R&D and institutional adoption. They also signal Ethereum’s attempt to distribute research, ecosystem, and market functions once concentrated within a single organization across several relatively independent centers of responsibility: EF focuses more closely on the base protocol and self-sovereignty; Ethlabs advances long-term R&D; Ethereum Institutional handles institutional engagement; and other organizations continue to take on education, developer support, and application adoption.
From an organizational perspective, this model will undoubtedly increase coordination costs. Different institutions have different funding sources, priorities, and operating rhythms, and disagreements over direction—or even competition for resources—may emerge.
On the other hand, a decentralized protocol that depends on a single foundation to perform nearly all of its critical work also carries a structural risk.
The real question raised by Ethereum’s organizational changes is not “Who will replace EF?” but whether Ethereum can build a collaborative structure in which other organizations can continue carrying out critical work even if one participant scales back, changes direction, or disappears entirely.
This organizational “subtraction” also foreshadows the protocol-level shift that follows.
2. A Shift in the Technical Narrative: What Is Lean Ethereum Actually Trying to Do?
Strictly speaking, Lean Ethereum was not introduced last week.
Back in July 2025, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake published a ten-year vision for “lean Ethereum,” outlining Lean Consensus, Lean Execution, and Lean Data. Its goals included scaling the base layer to 10,000 transactions per second and Layer 2 networks to 10 million, while preserving decentralization and 100% uptime.
The vision already called for major upgrades across Ethereum’s consensus, data, and execution layers, including Beacon Chain 2.0, post-quantum blobs 2.0, and a possible EVM 2.0 built on the open-source RISC-V instruction set. Its cryptography would rely entirely on hash-based signatures, hash-based data commitments, and native hash-based zero-knowledge virtual machines to achieve quantum resistance.
What changed this week is that Vitalik, drawing on the latest strawmap, elevated these separate research directions into a more explicit roadmap. Lean Ethereum is not a single hard fork, but a series of changes to be rolled out over the next three to four years—what he calls Ethereum’s “third major iteration.”
In Vitalik’s summary, Lean Ethereum touches nearly every core part of the protocol and can be grouped into four main areas:
Protocol simplification—from heavy execution to lightweight verification: Recursive STARKs would become a native core primitive, with proof verification replacing direct transaction re-execution. Client architecture, the state model, and multidimensional gas would be redesigned accordingly, making the protocol leaner and easier to verify formally.
Post-quantum security first: Quantum security is being moved from a distant concern to an immediate priority. Cryptographic components vulnerable to quantum computing would gradually be replaced with quantum-resistant alternatives, while quantum-secure blob design has been designated an urgent task.
Privacy as a first-class protocol goal: Privacy would no longer be treated as an application-layer add-on or an after-the-fact patch, but as a native protocol capability. New designs for Frames, the mempool, and the state tree would support quantum-secure private transactions without intermediaries.
Decoupling block availability from finality: At the consensus layer, the goal is to achieve finality within seconds—after one or two rounds of voting—while substantially reducing the burden on validators and light clients through a redesigned state model combining dynamic state with new scalable state types.
These directions may appear broad and complex, but they share one underlying logic: concentrate computation and complexity among a small number of proof-generating nodes, while allowing many more participants to verify the results at low cost.
At its core, Ethereum is no longer treating “short-term TPS” or “Layer 2 compatibility” as its sole narrative. It is reasserting the protocol’s role as long-term trusted infrastructure—verifiable, censorship-resistant, quantum-resistant, privacy-friendly, and lightweight to validate. Over the next decade, this marks a sweeping turn from “engineering iteration” back toward first principles.
Seen in this context, 0x02 compounding validators reflect the same long-term perspective.
Historically, discussions of ETH staking have focused mainly on APR and compounded returns through DeFi. Under the conventional 0x01 model, however, each validator’s effective balance is capped at 32 ETH. Consensus-layer rewards above that amount are periodically withdrawn and stop earning staking rewards.
For smaller stakers running only one or a few validators, rewards must accumulate to another 32 ETH before they can activate a new validator and begin earning on that capital again. This puts them at a built-in compounding disadvantage, while large staking providers can pool rewards across many validators and activate new ones much more quickly.
Pectra therefore introduced the 0x02 model, raising a validator’s maximum effective balance to 2,048 ETH and allowing rewards above 32 ETH to compound in 1 ETH increments. This lowers the compounding threshold for smaller stakers, narrows the capital-efficiency gap between participants of different sizes, and reduces redundant validators and their operational burden on the network.
This does not, of course, automatically mean that validators become more decentralized. More precisely, 0x02 improves validator-set efficiency at the protocol level while also improving capital efficiency and placing smaller stakers on more equal footing. Participants of all sizes can earn protocol-native returns with less friction.
This aligns closely with Lean Ethereum. Both emphasize the same goal: sustaining an Ethereum network that can operate over the long term with less redundancy and friction.
3. What Kind of Ethereum Should We Expect in the Next Decade?
From EF downsizing and independent organizations such as Ethlabs and Ethereum Institutional emerging, to Lean Ethereum shifting the focus from scaling toward protocol simplification, quantum resistance, privacy, and lightweight verification, and to 0x02 validators turning periodically withdrawn rewards into native yield that can compound continuously—these developments are not isolated from one another.
They all follow the same logic of subtraction: reducing Ethereum’s dependence on any single organization, lowering the cost for ordinary participants to verify the protocol, and cutting idle capital and redundant overhead in the staking process.
The hoped-for result is a more distributed system of responsibility, a base protocol that is easier to verify independently, and a yield structure better suited to long-term holders and participants who help secure the network.
These changes are unlikely to serve as an immediate price catalyst.
After all, Lean Ethereum will take three to four years—or perhaps longer—to roll out. The new organizational structure must show that coordination among multiple centers will not lead to strategic fragmentation. The compounding benefits of 0x02 validators will also need a full cycle to become clear.
But what Ethereum truly needs to prove in its next phase may never have been simply how many more upgrades it can ship.
More important is whether, as the value secured by the protocol grows and the external environment becomes more complex, Ethereum can depend less on any single organization, become easier to verify on consumer hardware, and provide more stable, sustainable long-term returns to the capital that secures the network.
“Lean” does not mean making Ethereum smaller. It means putting back at the center of the protocol what Ethereum truly needs to preserve for the decades ahead.