Vitalik Buterin Wants To Copy Bitcoin Design To Hyperscale Ethereum

What Happened

Buterin Praises Bitcoiners and Points Ahead

Neither proposal has a launch date. Therefore, the open question is whether the teams that build Ethereum’s software will pick both up.

Market Context

Markets have not rewarded the research push so far. ETH trades near $1,903, up 1.28% on the day, and the token has stalled below $2,000 for weeks.

Why It Matters

How Bitcoin’s Design Could Fix It

Developer conall.gwei joined the two ideas. Whoever builds the next block could then publish a single 128 kB summary and settle an enormous batch of payments at once.

Utreexo, the Bitcoin project he named, lets computers verify coins without keeping the full list. Buterin wants Ethereum to run both styles at once, so most activity scales up while ordinary people can still run a node. Those compact proofs, known as STARKs, already anchor his Lean Ethereum roadmap plans, which drew pushback over timelines in July. He also called the old tradeoff between speed, security and decentralization technically solved earlier this year.

Details

Vitalik Buterin has endorsed a plan to rebuild how Ethereum handles simple payments, copying a method Bitcoin has used since 2009. He credited Bitcoin developers for the idea on X.

The endorsement answers a problem Ethereum has carried for years. Every new account makes the network a little heavier to run.

Why Ethereum Keeps Getting Heavier

Thousands of computers worldwide hold a full copy of Ethereum. Those machines are called nodes, and each one stores every account ever created. That record never shrinks. A single account entry costs 100 to 150 bytes and stays there permanently, whether anyone uses it again or not.

Buterin has warned about the buildup before. He spent much of 2026 arguing that Ethereum’s deepest bottlenecks sit in how the network stores data. The side networks built on top are not the main problem.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstatter published an answer in July. He borrowed the way Bitcoin handles money, counting individual coins instead of running account balances.

Bitcoin calls those coins unspent transaction outputs, or UTXOs. Once someone spends one, almost nothing stays behind, roughly a third of a byte. The outcome shows up at scale. One billion Ethereum accounts would demand up to 150 gigabytes. One billion spent coins would need about 300 megabytes.

Recipients would gain something too. Today they need Ethereum’s token, ETH, in a wallet before money arrives. Under the new model the payment covers its own fee.

Buterin added the second half in January. He proposed letting computers bundle many transaction checks into one compact package, instead of passing a heavy check around for every payment.

Not everyone welcomed the borrowing. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson accused Ethereum of copying his own network’s coin tracking after the July proposal appeared.

Buterin answered him directly.

The foundation keeps shipping changes regardless. It set out its 2026 protocol priorities in February, then swapped core cryptography this month to guard against quantum computers.

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