Ethereum Copies Bitcoin Design to Hyperscale Payments

Vitalik Buterin has endorsed a plan to rebuild how Ethereum handles simple payments, copying a method Bitcoin has used since 2009.

The proposal aims to reduce the storage load on nodes by roughly 99% by using coin tracking, similar to Bitcoin's UTXO (unspent transaction output) system.

This is an attempt to solve one of Ethereum's long-standing problems: every new account makes the network a little heavier to run. With thousands of computers worldwide holding a full copy of Ethereum, this has become a significant issue.

Vitalik Buterin had previously warned about the buildup and spent much of 2026 arguing that Ethereum's deepest bottlenecks sit in how the network stores data.