Vitalik Buterin Details Ethereum's Five-Year Plan to Scale Execution, Data and State

Vitalik Buterin published a roadmap on Ethereum Research on Feb. 27, 2026, outlining a five-year plan to expand Ethereum's execution, data and state resources. Short-term execution gains of 10–30x are expected via Block Access Lists, ePBS and gas repricing, with longer-term improvements of around 1,000x through ZKEVM, while certain signature and SNARK/STARK computations could see up to 10,000x off-chain aggregation benefits. For data resources, he projects short-term growth of about 10–20x from P2P upgrades and multidimensional gas, and roughly 500x longer-term through Blobs plus PeerDAS, with a phased rollout where some nodes trial ZKEVM verification in 2026 and more nodes adopt it in 2027. On state resources, Buterin proposes a new architecture combining temporary, periodic and restricted storage with the existing format, allowing developers to choose between paying higher fees for traditional permanent state or redesigning applications to use new, cheaper state types.