Yesterday Ethereum turned 10. Today, lean Ethereum is unveiled as a vision—and personal mission—for the next 10 years. We stand at the dawn of a new era. Millions of TPS. Quantum adversaries. How does Ethereum marry extreme performance with uncompromising security and decentralization? TLDR: next-generation cryptography is central to winning both offense and defense. Disclaimer: This is a Drake take™ aimed at a broad audience. A technical deep dive into hash-based post-quantum signatures and SNARKs will follow. A healthy diversity of views across Protocol, the EF, and the broader Ethereum community is expected and welcome. It strengthens us. defense—fort mode Ethereum is special. 100% uptime since genesis. Unrivaled client diversity. $130B in economic security (35.7M ETH staked × $3.7K)—maybe soon $1T. Ethereum is poised to become the bedrock of the internet of value, securing hundreds of trillions over decades, even centuries. Ethereum must survive anything: nation states, quantum computers. Whatever comes. Call it fort mode. If the internet is up, Ethereum is up. If the world is online, the world is onchain. offense—beast mode Ethereum is hungry. “Scale L1, scale blobs” is a strategic urgency inside the EF’s Protocol cluster. Expect low-hanging performance gains over the next 6–12 months. Longer term? Think gigagas L1, teragas L2. Call it beast mode. → 1 gigagas/sec on L1: 10K TPS, ambitious vertical scale → 1 teragas/sec on L2: 1M TPS, sprawling horizontal scale Scale vs decentralization? Why not both. The moon math we need is now tamed: → real-time zkVMs for lean execution → data availability sampling (DAS) for lean data A delicious cherry on top: full chain verification across every browser, wallet, phone. lean upgrades Lean Ethereum proposes bold upgrades across all three L1 sublayers: → lean consensus is beacon chain 2.0: hardened for ultimate security and decentralization, plus finality in seconds; formerly branded as “beam chain” → lean data is blobs 2.0: post-quantum blobs, plus granular blob sizing for a calldata-like developer experience → lean execution is EVM 2.0: a minimal, SNARK-friendly instruction set (possibly RISC-V; pronounced “risk five”), boosting performance while preserving EVM compatibility and its network effects The consensus layer (CL), data layer (DL), execution layer (EL) have each been reimagined from first principles. Together, they unlock fort mode and beast mode. The goal: performance abundance under the constraint of non-negotiable continuity, maximum hardness, and refreshing simplicity. lean cryptography Hash-based cryptography is emerging as the ideal foundation for lean Ethereum. It offers a compelling, unified answer to two megatrends reshaping the ecosystem: → the explosive rise of SNARKs → the looming quantum threat Imagine the leanest cryptographic brick—the hash function—singlehandedly powering L1: → CL: hash-based aggregate signatures upgrade BLS signatures → DL: hash-based DAS commitments upgrade KZG commitments → EL: hash-based real-time zkVMs upgrade EVM re-execution A cryptographic jewel in each of lean CL, lean DL, lean EL. lean craft Lean Ethereum is more than a blueprint for hardening and scaling Ethereum. More than just doubling down on security, decentralisation, and cutting-edge cryptography. It is an aesthetic. An art form. A craft. Think Jiro in Dreams of Sushi. When we can go the extra mile, we do. Minimalism. Modularity. Encapsulated complexity. Formal verification. Provable security. Provable optimality. These are subtle yet important technical considerations. Stay tuned for the post on post-quantum cryptography that will make them explicit. lean legacy After 10 fantastic years, lean Ethereum is a generational oath. To keep Ethereum online no matter what. To scale it without compromise. To make it worthy of those who come next. This is about legacy. We are builders, we are missionaries. We are Ethereum. I hope you join us.

At @ziskvm, we’re now proving Ethereum blocks in real time — open source and running on increasingly efficient infrastructure. It’s an early but meaningful milestone. Join me today at 13:00 @ EthCC, Redford Stage to learn more. #EthCC #ZK #Ethereum #zkVM @eth_proofs

real-time proving Q&A :) What is it? ELI12. A: An army of nerds just cracked a sci-fi problem: proving every Ethereum mainnet block in real time. These zk proofs are exponentially cheaper to verify than re-executing transactions—just a few milliseconds, no matter the gas used. Thicc blocks, tiny validators. Decentralisation maxis rejoice. Wasn't real-time proving impossible moon math? A: It was. Five years ago we were five orders of magnitude away. But the tech kept compounding 10x/year, and now we're here. Don't fade exponentials. Also, on exponentials: → don't fade quantum computers breaking ECDSA → don't fade halvings breaking Bitcoin security How does Ethereum L1 become a "based and native rollup"? A: Let's break it down. → based: L1 proposers order transactions. Ethereum L1 is the base layer—it's tautologically based. → native: L1 executes transactions via the enshrined EVM state transition function. By definition Ethereum L1 is native. Always will be. → rollup: A rollup has onchain data and offchain execution. By snarking mainnet EVM blocks Ethereum L1 turns into a zk rollup. Rollups unlock big gas limits. Base is already at 35 megagas/sec—20x Ethereum L1. Base is aiming for 1 gigagas/sec, Ethereum L1 can get there too. Wen gigagas L1? A: Ethproofs call #3 will be dedicated to gigagas L1—do tune in. With EIP-9698 Dankrad proposes ~3x/year gas bumps, or ~10x every 2 years. That's 1,000x in 6 years. Respectable—but still rookie numbers. My optimistic take? Now that zkVMs match EVM performance gas limits can track zkVM improvements. If we keep hitting 10x/year that's 1 gigagas/sec in 3 years. I worked with Dankrad for over a decade—reality usually lands between his caution and my hopium. Aren't zkVM buggy? What about formal verification? A: Formal verification is the endgame—not step one. The short-term strategy: zkVM diversity. By end of Q2 a handful of zkVMs will hit real-time proving. Just like CL and EL clients, any individual client is assumed buggy. Security comes from diversity. Can low-latency proving scale to gigagas? A: Yes. SNARK proving is massively parallelisable. Only the initial x86 execution and chunking is sequencial. EIP-7825 proposes to cap the maximum amount of gas used per transaction. This allows for easy chunking at transaction boundaries. Parallelism scales. Latency stays low. What's the next zkVM bottleneck? Power. Credible 1-of-n prover liveness means home proving should be accessible to enthusiasts. A reasonable target may be 10kW or less per proving cluster. How do we grow the gas limit 1,000x on a 10kW budget? → software: proof systems, circuits, algos keep compounding → hardware: Moore's law + SNARK ASICs → distributed proving: spread the load, trustlessly

🤯 real-time proving is here 🤯 Mainnet EVM blocks proven in under 1 Ethereum slot (12s). Goosebumps. Succinct proves every Ethereum L1 block: → 94% in <12s → 99% in <13s → 99.9% in <12s, soon™ Yesterday RISC Zero unveiled a $120K home GPU cluster—proofs expected in 9.25s. Brevis, OpenVM, Snarkify, ZisK, ZKM are weeks from joining the real-time club. Soon™ my validator will verify EVM blocks on a Rasberry Pi Pico—a $5 board that consumes <1W. I will ditch my EL client in favour of a zkEL. No 1 TB NVMe. Goodbye Geth, hello zkReth. Stateless and RAMless verification in milliseconds on a single CPU core. With real-time proving 1 gigagas/sec (10K TPS) is within reach, without compromising validator decentralisation. From now on expect regular gas limit bumps. 10% of stake is already voting for a 60M limit—your validators can too. Snarkifying mainnet turns Ethereum L1 into the first based and native rollup. Stage 2. Bug-free. Decentralised sequencing. No security council. No governance. The L1 will lead by example. This Friday we celebrate. Join us for Ethproofs call #2, May 23 at 2pm UTC. 25 speakers, 2 hours of content. Calls are open—DM @corcoranwill for a calendar invite. We are witnessing history. Believe in something real. Believe in real-time proving.

the eth core devs don’t tweet a lot about just how hard the work that they do is so let’s talk about it: 1. every line of code they merge can move more money than most banks process in a quarter. there is no staging server for that. 2. they swap consensus logic for a 400B + dollar economy without scheduling downtime. ever. 3. they coordinate hundreds of researchers, auditors, and client teams across time zones, cultures, and philosophies, yet ship like a single mind. 4. they do it all in public, with every decision dissected by the loudest peanut gallery on the internet, and still keep the vibe collaborative. 5. they design for attackers who have nine figure incentives and infinite patience. then they sleep anyway. 6. they keep six independent clients in perfect sync so the same block lives at the same height for every node in the world. 7. they turn bleeding edge research into production code while preserving backwards compatibility for machines that went online before defi even had a name. 8. they debug issues that only happen once a year on a single archive node because someone somewhere will rely on that edge case. 9. they write cryptography that must stay unbroken for decades while the math itself evolves beneath their feet. 10.when the upgrade lands smooth the outside world shrugs. inside ethereum we know it was a minor miracle. every successful fork proves that decentralized coordination can outperform the world’s best hierarchies and shows that open internet capital markets are now the default. thank you, truly. we owe you everything.

configured my validator for a 60M gas limit ⛽ → 66% bump from 36M is safe post-Pectra → validators set the limit—vote with yours → instructions at PumpTheGas[.]org wen 1 gigagas/sec (10K TPS) on Ethereum L1? → needs zkEVM proofs for consumer devices → Ethproofs call #2: real-time proving → Ethproofs call #3: gigagas L1 believe in something

Simplifying the L1

Introducing Ethereum R1 — The neutral rollup built for Ethereum No token. No private sales. No governance cult. Just Ethereum values, public funding, and community control. 🧵 Why R1 matters & how you can join:

1 gigagas/sec (10K TPS) on Ethereum L1 with zkVMs no compromises: → consumer hardware (zkVMs) → home internet (DAS) → censorship resistance (FOCIL) → 100% uptime (client diversity) → 8K consensus nodes Built for internet finance. Believe in something real.

three new zkVMs unveiled on Ethproofs call #1 → Ix (Lean 4) by @argumentxyz → StarkV (RISC-V) by @StarkWareLtd → zCray (RISC-V inspired) by @IrreducibleHW