Lean Ethereum: the most ambitious plan in crypto, or a last chance overhaul?

The Ethereum Foundation, the organization that funds the development of the network, is cutting 54 jobs. One-fifth of its workforce. Eleven days later, Vitalik Buterin, its co-founder, presents the third major iteration of Ethereum, a redesign as profound as The Merge. Meanwhile, ether is lingering 60% below its summer 2025 peak.

Two possible interpretations. Either the most ambitious plan that crypto has produced in years, or a foundation that is accelerating because it has no real choice left. This redesign is called Lean Ethereum, and our latest video breaks it down. Here’s a taste of what’s to come. Key points of this article:

• The Ethereum Foundation has cut 54 jobs, or one-fifth of its workforce, before unveiling the major redesign Lean Ethereum.
• Lean Ethereum aims to radically simplify the network by reducing the number of lines of code and lowering costs, in the face of the threat of quantum computers.

Lean Ethereum: removing everything to simplify everything

Let’s go back to November 2024, at Devcon in Bangkok. Justin Drake, one of the Foundation's most prominent researchers, takes the stage and proposes to rewrite the consensus layer from scratch, the one that manages validators and security. Eight months later, he expands the idea to all three layers of the network at once.

The essence of Lean Ethereum can be summed up in one sentence: replace the stack of cryptographic families accumulated over ten years with a single building block, the hash function, the most basic tool in the toolbox. Behind this lies an obsession of Vitalik’s: simplicity. Ethereum runs with 300,000 lines of code. Bitcoin, about 15,000.

And for you, this would mean a final transaction in a few seconds instead of a quarter of an hour, lower fees on layer 2 (second layer networks), and a validator entry ticket dropping from 32 ethers to just one.

The quantum computer, the real engine of the project

On March 30, Google’s Quantum AI team published a paper on the vulnerability of cryptos to quantum computers. Co-signed by Justin Drake himself. A researcher from the Foundation co-wrote the document explaining how to break Ethereum's cryptography. And its conclusion is painful, as fewer than 500,000 qubits would be enough, compared to the 9 million previously estimated.

We are still far from current machines, of course. But nearly 17% of ETH are potentially vulnerable, and an attacker can record encrypted data today to break it later. Google has set itself a deadline of 2029 to migrate its own systems, controlling its entire infrastructure. The Foundation, on the other hand, talks about three to four years. This is not a comfortable timeline; it’s already tight.

A coherent bet, launched from the weakest position

And the project starts at the worst possible time. A closed research lab, five senior researchers left to found their own lab the day before the layoffs, a timeline contested even internally. Not to mention a precedent that makes one smile wryly: The Merge remained "six months from its launch" for four years.

So, healthy decentralization of research or brain drain? The two interpretations from the beginning are still on the table, and the video gives you the means to decide, with numbers to back it up, from the cost of a proof divided by more than a hundred in a year to the 10,000 transactions per second targeted in "beast mode".

Let us know in the comments what you think of Ethereum right now. We leave you with the video!