Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled an updated roadmap he calls the network’s third major transformation, comparable in scale to the 2022 Merge that ended proof-of-work mining. N
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled an updated roadmap he calls the network’s third major transformation, comparable in scale to the 2022 Merge that ended proof-of-work mining. Nearly every core component of the protocol will be rebuilt over three to four years, he said, without forcing existing applications to migrate.
Buterin shared his conclusions in a post on July 4, 2026, following a gathering of Ethereum researchers in Berlin. The updated plan, called ‘Lean Ethereum,’ was first sketched out in 2025 and is publicly tracked at strawmap.org.
