Vitalik Buterin Introduces leanVM as Next Step for Ethereum Scaling
Date: 2025-09-08 Author: Gabriel Deangelo Categories: BUSINESS
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced an important advance in the network's development and introduced leanVM, an experimental virtual machine specifically designed to optimize ZK proofs. According to him, this solution will significantly reduce scaling costs and make recursion in Ethereum almost ten times faster.
Buterin emphasized that the Ethereum team has made significant progress this year in ensuring long-term sustainability, decentralization, and scalability of the blockchain. Among the upcoming stages of the roadmap, a special place is occupied by leanVM, which was created as a zkVM with a minimalistic approach.
According to the developers, the leanVM architecture is based on a four-instruction set of instructions (ISA), the use of multi-linear STARK proofs, and the logup-lookups method. This approach allows to significantly reduce the cost of commits in comparison with existing solutions, for example, with Cairo. The current recursion speed is about 2.7 seconds, but the team plans to achieve a tenfold acceleration, which will be a serious step in increasing the efficiency of the network.
Vitalik noted that he is especially close to the idea of simplicity and conciseness in protocol design. According to him, each element of leanVM requires a minimum number of lines of code, and the protocols themselves should be considered works of art, and not temporary constructions for the sake of convenience.
He also clarified that the development of the lean direction is intentionally moving slightly slower than the short-term scaling roadmap. This strategy allows for the implementation of solutions exactly when the previous stages are already fully operational in the mainnet. The main goal of leanVM and the ZK-friendly ISA is to make Ethereum scaling safe and sustainable without unnecessary infrastructure requirements.
It is worth recalling that in May 2025, the Pectra update was successfully implemented in the Ethereum mainnet, which became an important step in the technological evolution of the ecosystem. The next major update, called Fusaka, is expected in November of this year, and it should also bring significant changes to the network.
Thus, the announcement of leanVM reflects the long-term development strategy of Ethereum, in which scalability, simplicity of architecture, and network stability under increasing load remain key priorities.
