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Vitalik Buterin published a technical proposal to radically shrink Ethereum’s consensus layer, as part of the long-term “Lean Ethereum” overhaul aimed at making 
Ethereum more scalable, private, and quantum-resistant.
What's the Scoop?
- The Proposal: In a forum post titled “The Extremely Lean Chain,” Buterin outlined a two-phase plan to make Ethereum store far less validator data directly onchain. Rather than the network carrying every validator’s full state record, validators would keep more of their own records and use ZK to prove to the chain that those records are correct. The goal is to shrink validator state to roughly 6 bytes while preserving Ethereum’s security guarantees.
- How It Works: Phase 1 removes most validator data from the chain and replaces frequent balance accounting with ZK proofs that show a validator’s rewards, penalties, and participation history are accurate. Phase 2 adds privacy by giving validators fresh anonymous identities each day, making it harder to track the same validator over time.
- The Scale Argument: The basic idea behind the change is to is to make nodes easier to run by reducing the amount of validator-specific data every node must store and process, with the end goal of having Ethereum run more validators.
