Vitalik Buterin has thrown his weight behind a proposal to rebuild Ethereum's simple payments on Bitcoin's UTXO model, crediting Bitcoin developers for the idea in an X post. The plan, first floated by Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstatter in July, would slash the storage cost of each payment by orders of magnitude and could eventually let people receive ETH without holding a wallet balance.
The UTXO pitch
Ethereum nodes store every account ever created, with each entry costing 100-150 bytes permanently. That's heavy. Bitcoin's unspent transaction output model leaves about a third of a byte per spent coin. Wahrstatter's proposal borrows that approach, and Buterin is openly endorsing it. The numbers are stark: a billion Ethereum accounts would eat up to 150 GB, while a billion spent coins would need roughly 300 MB.
Under the new model, recipients wouldn't need ETH in a wallet to receive payments. The payment covers its own fee, which removes a common onboarding barrier.
Buterin's second act: STARKs
This isn't the only trick up Buterin's sleeve. In January he added a second part: bundling many transaction checks into one compact package using STARKs. Developer conall.gwei combined the two ideas — a block producer could publish a 128 kB summary to settle an enormous batch of payments. Buterin praised the approach, mentioning Utreexo, a tool that lets computers verify coins without keeping the full list.
His bigger goal is to run both styles at once. Most activity would scale on the lean UTXO-style state, while ordinary people could still run a node on the full, dynamic state. That dual-track vision is part of his Lean Ethereum roadmap, which drew pushback over timelines in July.
Cardano's jab and Ethereum's stance
Not everyone is applauding. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson accused Ethereum of copying Cardano's coin tracking after the July proposal. Buterin didn't bite on the accusation. Instead he praised Bitcoiners directly, saying Ethereum wants the best of UTXO-style state and dynamic state — a nod to where the real inspiration came from.
This month the Ethereum Foundation swapped core cryptography to guard against quantum computers, and in February it set out 2026 protocol priorities. Neither the UTXO plan nor the STARK bundling has a launch date. The open question is whether Ethereum software teams will adopt both — and how fast.
