Justin Drake Unveils Ambitious 10-Year ’Lean Ethereum’ Plan—10k TPS Mainnet Incoming

Ethereum’s scaling ambitions just got a turbocharge. Researcher Justin Drake dropped a bombshell roadmap—dubbed 'Lean Ethereum'—that promises to push the network to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) within a decade. No more 'world computer' fantasies—just cold, hard throughput.

The Need for Speed

Ethereum’s current ~15 TPS feels like dial-up next to Solana’s fiber-optic pace. Drake’s plan? Strip the fat, optimize the stack, and hit five-figure TPS without compromising decentralization. Audacious? Sure. Impossible? Not anymore.

The Fine Print

No dates, no guarantees—just a 10-year horizon. Layer-2 rollups? Still crucial. Validators? Expect upgrades. The real kicker? Doing it all without turning Ethereum into a corporate chain. (Take notes, Wall Street blockchain cosplayers.)

Drake’s vision cuts through the noise. If it works, ETH flips from 'digital oil' to the internet’s backbone. If not? Well, there’s always another ICO.

Fort mode and beast mode

Drake’s security thesis highlights that Ethereum must run for decades, even centuries, under adversarial conditions. 

According to the roadmap, “if the internet is up, Ethereum is up” is the goal. On performance, Lean Ethereum targets roughly 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) on mainnet via aggressive vertical scaling and approximately 1 million TPS on layer-2 (L2) blockchains via expansive horizontal scaling. 

He added that enabling “moon-math” is no longer aspirational, suggesting real-time zero-knowledge VIRTUAL machines (zkVMs) for execution and data availability sampling (DAS) for data throughput. 

A complementary usability aim is full-chain verification on consumer devices, such as browsers, phones, and wallets.

Three “lean” sublayers

Lean Ethereum proposes coordinated upgrades across three different layers. The first is “Lean consensus,” or Beacon Chain 2.0, focused on hardening the Beacon Chain for maximum security and decentralization, with near-instant finality measured in seconds.

Lean data (Blobs 2.0) is the second layer. The goal is to enable post-quantum “blobs” with granular sizing to preserve a calldata-like developer experience while boosting throughput.

Lastly, Lean execution (EVM 2.0) consists of a minimal, SNARK-friendly instruction set that preserves EVM compatibility and network effects but accelerates proving and verification.

Together, these changes aim to deliver “performance abundance” under non-negotiable continuity and simplicity constraints.

Hash-based crypto as the standard fabric

Lean Ethereum treats the hash function as the fundamental primitive across layers. Aggregate signatures in consensus supplanting Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS), hash-based commitments replacing Kate, Zaverucha, and Goldberg (KZG) in the data layer, and hash-centric zkVMs streamlining execution verification. 

The approach is designed to simultaneously future-proof against quantum adversaries while harmonizing with the rapid rise of SNARKs across the stack.

Drake said that Lean Ethereum is as much an engineering aesthetic as a roadmap. The concept is based on minimal modules, encapsulated complexity, formal verification, and provable security and optimality. 

The emphasis on “lean craft” seeks to prune legacy complexity while standardizing on primitives that are easier to reason and verify.