Lean Ethereum

In November 2024 Justin Drake proposed redoing Ethereum's consensus layer from a clean slate, first called the beam chain. By 2025 the name had widened to lean Ethereum, with the same idea applied to data and execution too. This is how it was argued: why start over, the worry that it should not arrive as one big upgrade, the tension between the lean research branch and the rest of protocol work, the hard parts of post-quantum signatures, and the Devcon 8 pull-forward. It is a proposal and a plan, not a scheduled upgrade. Every quote is the speaker's own words in their order, with the ums and stumbles taken out; the original captions are one tap away.