Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said artificial intelligence could speed work on a leaner network, while one proposed change would reduce stored validator data by assigning validators daily proof work.
In a Nov. 4 interview with Moneycontrol, Buterin said formal verification could help developers assess the safety of code and algorithms. He said AI could shorten work on Lean Ethereum, a multiyear upgrade effort intended to improve performance while preserving security and decentralization.
Buterin said that, by the standards of five years earlier, the roadmap work might have taken 20 years without AI. He linked the effort to broader use of zero-knowledge proofs.
In a July 6, 2026, post on Ethereum Research, Buterin proposed changing how the network keeps track of validator balances. Under the design, validators would prove their balances each day, allowing Ethereum to retain less validator information on-chain. Buterin wrote that updates to validator state every epoch are expensive and that the change could help the network's consensus process scale.
The proposal would move recurring state management and proof generation to validators. Buterin's post gave no monetary estimate for that work.
Ethereum Foundation research engineer Tau Lepton said a Sepolia trial of EIP-8025 execution proofs produced proofs in about six to seven seconds per block. Ethereum's 12-second block interval provides a benchmark for the result. The proofs are designed to let validators check a block without running each transaction again.
Lepton cautioned that validators should keep running execution clients and should not use the test proofs for fork-choice or attestation decisions. In an Oct. 26 update, he said further tests would use different prover and client combinations over the following days to weeks.
