Vitalik Proposes 'Extremely Lean Chain' Scheme: Validators Submit STARK Proofs Daily, State Storage Compressed to 6 Bytes

CoinFeed July 6 news, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published the 'The Extremely Lean Chain' proposal, demonstrating how to radically compress the state requirements of the Ethereum consensus chain under the 'Lean' upgrade context. The scheme shifts responsibility to validators, who manage and periodically prove their state via ZK, thereby eliminating per-epoch processing burden and potentially supporting millions of validators. Core mechanisms include: removing validator public keys from on-chain state, storing only the deposit tree index; canceling real-time reward and penalty processing, with validators generating daily STARK proofs of their participation and updating balances; validator identities fully re-randomized daily, achieving strong anonymity through ZK-STARK, with withdrawal addresses only revealed at withdrawal time, not publicly linked to deposits or on-chain activity.