Vitalik Buterin Wants to Copy Bitcoin Design to Hyperscale Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin has endorsed a plan to rebuild how Ethereum handles simple payments, copying a method Bitcoin has used since 2009. He credited Bitcoin developers for the idea on X.

The endorsement answers a problem Ethereum has carried for years. Every new account makes the network a little heavier to run.

Why Ethereum Keeps Getting Heavier

Thousands of computers worldwide hold a full copy of Ethereum. Those machines are called nodes, and each one stores every account ever created. That record never shrinks. A single account entry costs 100 to 150 bytes and stays there permanently, whether anyone uses it again or not.

Buterin has warned about the buildup before. He spent much of 2026 arguing that Ethereum's deepest bottlenecks sit in how the network stores data. The side networks built on top are not the main problem.

How Bitcoin's Design Could Fix It

Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstatter published an answer in July. He borrowed the way Bitcoin handles money, counting individual coins instead of running account balances.

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