Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin highlighted significant progress made this year by the team towards long-term goals of scalability, decentralization, and resilience. Buterin emphasized that key milestones in the short-term roadmap are on track to achieve these objectives. Notably, he introduced a new technical proposal called ‘leanVM,’ a minimal zkVM designed for optimized XMSS aggregation and recursion. This proposal boasts significant processing cost reductions compared to Cairo by utilizing a four-instruction ISA, multilinear STARKs, and logup lookups. Buterin noted that this innovation is part of a larger effort to build more sophisticated protocols beyond short-term convenience.