Vitalik proposes an "extremely streamlined chain" solution. The verifier submits STARK every day to prove that the status storage is compressed to 6 bytes

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released the "The ExtremelyLean Chain" proposal to demonstrate how to aggressively compress the status requirements of the Ethereum consensus chain in the context of a "Lean" upgrade. The solution shifts responsibility to the verifier, who manages it and regularly certifies its status through ZK, eliminating the per-epoch processing burden and potentially supporting millions of verifiers. The core mechanisms include: removing the verifier's public key from the on-chain state and storing only the deposit tree index; canceling real-time reward and penalty processing, and the verifier generates a STARK every day to prove his participation and updates the balance; the verifier's identity is completely re-randomized every day., achieving strong anonymity through ZK-STARK, the withdrawal address is only exposed at the time of withdrawal and is not publicly associated with deposits or on-chain activities. Vitalik said that the solution can compress the state requirements per verifier from approximately 180 bytes to 6 bytes based on upgrades such as single-slot finality and anti-quantum signature aggregation. The daily certification cost for a single verifier is about 5400 Merkle branches, which can be completed in 1 hour on ordinary hardware, and the burden on the chain can be reduced by aggregating certificates. In addition, this design can implement the single secret leader election function "almost for free", with 1 day as the conservative cycle length and 1 hour as the lower limit.