Last Sunday Vitalik Buterin wrote that the Lean team Ethereum has done a truly amazing job and achieved all of its goals in the long-term scaling, decentralization and sustainability program Ethereum.
Lean Ethereum — is a proposal from the developers of zkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine), which aims to provide a recursion-enabled virtual machine for zero-knowledge proofs. It is essentially a stripped-down, more efficient version of the computational engine Ethereum.
Buterin added that LeanVM is designed to integrate securely with mainnet operations:
The thing is, the Lean roadmap lags behind the short-term scaling milestones, so ideally the former will be ready to launch exactly when the latter is fully launched on the mainnet.
According to the Lean roadmap, development will begin in 2026 and testing will begin in 2027. The long-term goal is to complete the roadmap in 4-5 years so that Ethereum could go into «maintenance mode».
LeanVM is expected to reduce the cost of large-scale computing, speed up recursion for computation, and ensure decentralization and security of the network.
Next major mainnet update Ethereum «Fusaka» is scheduled for November and aims to improve efficiency Ethereum for second-tier deployments, and improve base-tier performance and availability.
Buterin also wrote that protocols are «works of art» with minimal code, and blockchains should be elegant and simple, not a messy, multiplying patch.
Let us recall that during its existence Block Ethereum changed its consensus algorithm from PoW to PoS and is now going through a series of major updates, with its developers considering various network improvement proposals (EIPs).