Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin credited Bitcoin developers on August 16 for work on Utreexo while outlining Ethereum's proposed hybrid state scaling strategy. According to reports from crypto.news, Buterin described the architecture as the "current proposed Ethereum scaling strategy," making clear that the architecture remains under development. The goal is to allow most Ethereum activity to scale much further without sacrificing decentralization, censorship resistance or ease of running nodes. As reported by AMBCrypto, Buterin is now looking beyond simply processing more transactions and towards reducing what nodes must retain, as the growing amount of network data makes running a full node increasingly demanding.
A July 6 Ethereum Research proposal from Toni Wahrstätter (writing as Nero_eth) proposes adding native UTXO-like payments without removing Ethereum accounts. As reported by crypto.news, the model targets one-shot payments that do not require persistent smart-contract state. The proposal estimates these workloads could reduce permanent state usage by roughly 99.8%. According to AMBCrypto, approximately 80% to 82% of the data held on Ethereum is produced as new permanent records, compared to 14% from accounts and 4% from contract code. The UTXO database typically occupies roughly 11–11.5 GB, whereas Utreexo reduces locally stored information to under 1 KB, with the trade-off coming through additional proof data during verification. At one billion entries, the proposal estimates roughly 300 MB of permanent state, compared with about 100 GB to 150 GB for equivalent account or storage entries.
Buterin's January recursive-STARK mempool research tackles proof bandwidth constraints differently. According to crypto.news, his model assumes highly optimized STARK proofs of about 128 kB and proposes that mempool nodes periodically combine validity proofs recursively instead of attaching separate large proofs to every object. Using Buterin's example of eight peers and 500-millisecond aggregation intervals, extra bandwidth would total about 2 MB per second per node and remain constant as more objects enter the scheme. As reported by AMBCrypto, developer conall.gwei joined the two ideas, suggesting that whoever builds the next block could then publish a single 128 kB summary and settle an enormous batch of payments at once. The mempool research and native UTXO proposal address different constraints, although researchers are exploring how such technologies might complement one another.
The native UTXO proposal assumes EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions) for its preferred spending design, which would introduce programmable transaction frames covering validation, gas payment and execution. As reported by crypto.news, the official Hegotá specification currently lists Frame Transactions only as "Considered for Inclusion." Ethereum's official roadmap places Hegotá in 2027, after Glamsterdam in the fourth quarter of 2026. Native UTXOs are not currently listed as a scheduled Hegotá feature, with Hegotá's 2027 upgrade scope still being narrowed. According to AMBCrypto, the lighter storage model might just be more practical when considering how little of Ethereum's stored information sees regular use, with less than 4% of both account and storage records being accessible in 30 days. Neither proposal has a launch date, with the open question being whether the teams that build Ethereum's software will pick both up.
Buterin's Utreexo reference therefore signals a research direction rather than a dated Ethereum upgrade. According to crypto.news, the work points toward a hybrid system in which different types of activity could use different state models, while cryptographic proofs reduce what individual nodes must store or repeatedly verify. As reported by AMBCrypto, solving the issue of state growth can enable Ethereum to scale without increasing the cost of decentralizing with scaling, with the long-term scalability path for Ethereum now dependent upon achieving this balance. The relevant designs remain research proposals rather than approved protocol changes, with Buterin's research not establishing unlimited transaction capacity or confirming future Ethereum block format specifications. The foundation keeps shipping changes regardless, having set out its 2026 protocol priorities in February and swapping core cryptography this month to guard against quantum computers.
