Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled an ambitious strategy to overhaul the blockchain’s execution layer, aiming to rebuild key components from the ground up. This move seemingly signals a significant shift toward greater efficiency, security, and adaptability in one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency networks. Ethereum, known for its smart contract capabilities and decentralized applications, has long faced challenges in scaling and performance.
Buterin’s proposal addresses these head-on by targeting the state tree and virtual machine (VM) – foundational elements that handle data storage and code execution.
Now, scaling.
There are two buckets here: short-term and long-term.
Short term scaling I've written about elsewhere. Basically:
* Block level access lists (coming in Glamsterdam) allow blocks to be verified in parallel.
* ePBS (coming in Glamsterdam) has many features, of…— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 27, 2026
At the core of the plan is a transformation of Ethereum’s state tree structure. Currently relying on a hexary Merkle Patricia Trie hashed with Keccak, the system would transition to a binary tree using a more optimized hash function, such as Blake3 or a variant of Poseidon.
This redesign aims for several advantages.
For starters, it could shorten Merkle branches by a factor of four, reducing data bandwidth needs and making client-side verification more feasible.
Proving operations might see efficiency gains of three to four times from shorter branches alone, with additional boosts from the new hashing – potentially up to 100 times faster in some cases, though further security reviews are needed.
Beyond speed, the binary approach would group storage slots into compact “pages” of 64 to 256 slots, allowing for bulk loading and editing.
This could cut gas costs significantly for applications accessing multiple slots, with savings exceeding 10,000 gas per transaction in common scenarios.
It also minimizes variances in access depths between large and small contracts, simplifies the overall architecture, and paves the way for features like state expiry.
Buterin emphasizes that this “omnibus” update incorporates a decade of insights into effective state management, making Ethereum more prover-friendly for zero-knowledge applications that integrate directly with the main chain.
Equally transformative is the proposed evolution of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Buterin advocates for a long-term replacement with a more advanced VM, possibly based on RISC-V architecture, to eliminate inefficiencies and special cases that have accumulated over time.
The new system would outperform the EVM in raw execution, rendering many precompiles obsolete while enhancing prover efficiency.
Designed for simplicity – a RISC-V interpreter might span just a few hundred lines of code – it would support client-side zero-knowledge proofs, enabling users to verify outcomes like account interactions without relying on the network.
To ensure smooth adoption, Buterin outlines a phased rollout: initially using the new VM for precompiles, then allowing user-deployed contracts, and finally retiring the EVM by converting it into a smart contract on the new framework.
This maintains backward compatibility, with gas adjustments overshadowed by ongoing scaling efforts.
While acknowledging that Ethereum could function adequately with incremental tweaks like vectorized math precompiles, Buterin argues for these deeper reforms to unlock true generality and beauty in the protocol.
These changes tackle over 80% of bottlenecks in proving and execution, crucial for high-throughput scaling and decentralized validation.
By prioritizing client-side capabilities and long-term robustness, the plan aligns with Ethereum‘s ethos of trust-minimization.
As the network eyes thousands of transactions per second, this overhaul could solidify its position against competitors built with zero-knowledge in mind from the start.
Community reactions have been mixed, with enthusiasm over potential efficiencies tempered by concerns about implementation risks. Nonetheless, Buterin‘s vision positions Ethereum not just as a survivor, but as a thriving, innovative force in blockchain technology for decades ahead.