The Third Transformation: Ethereum Embarks on the "Purge Era"
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revealed a comprehensive long-term roadmap dubbed "The Purge," finalized by researchers at a recent Berlin conference. This isn't a single hard fork but a multi-year series of upgrades spanning three to four years. It is poised to become Ethereum's third major epoch, comparable to The Merge, with the ambition of overhauling nearly all of the network's core components.
Core Upgrades: From Architecture to User Experience
The scope of changes is profound. At the consensus layer, verification will shift from direct execution to more efficient recursive STARK proofs, coupled with a 1-2 round fast finality mechanism for quicker and more secure transaction settlement. The gas pricing model will also become more multidimensional and refined.
The most disruptive change, however, lies in a complete rewrite of the state model. The existing dynamic state will be capped at around 2TB, while new scalable state architectures like UTXO and ring buffers are introduced. This combination allows the total state capacity to leap to the 100TB scale, easily accommodating the growth of ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, and DeFi applications. This optimization could potentially reduce user transaction fees by over 10x.
For existing complex applications like Uniswap pools, the protocol will allow them to remain in the old state model without forced migration, ensuring maximum continuity for the ecosystem.
Primary Goals: Quantum Resistance and Privacy-by-Design
Addressing future security threats, Ethereum has made the full adoption of quantum-resistant cryptography a central priority, planning to phase out current cryptographic schemes. More notably, privacy has been elevated to a first-class design goal of the protocol. This means all newly developed network components will need to natively support trustless, private transactions.
In terms of development, formal verification will be widely adopted to enhance code security. The protocol is even exploring the introduction of RISC-V or a lean ISA as the underlying virtual machine, with the current EVM potentially becoming a compilation target in the future.
The Roadmap and the Path Forward
Key scalability metrics—including the gas limit, blob capacity, and block time—are set for multiple increases over the next five years. The upcoming Glasterdam fork will be the first to significantly raise the gas limit.
According to the plan, the H-star (Hegota) fork will be the final upgrade of the "pre-Purge" era. After that, Ethereum will fully enter its "Purge" epoch. This careful, five-year evolution aims to reshape Ethereum into a next-generation network that is quantum-resistant, massively scalable, and privacy-centric, all while maintaining continuity for existing decentralized applications.