TLDR
- Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin credited Bitcoin developers for Utreexo while outlining a proposed hybrid state scaling strategy for Ethereum.
- Ethereum researcher Toni Wahrstätter proposed native UTXOs that could cut payment state usage by roughly 99.8%.
- The proposal keeps Ethereum accounts but moves simple one-shot payments into a lighter UTXO-style model.
- EIP-8141 Frame Transactions, required by the UTXO design, is only under consideration for the Hegotá upgrade.
- Buterin’s recursive-STARK mempool proposal limits proof bandwidth overhead, not unlimited transaction throughput.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, credited Bitcoin developers on August 16 for their work on Utreexo. He described it as an inspiration for a proposed Ethereum scaling direction that could combine UTXO-style state, conventional dynamic state, and models in between.
Buterin called this the “current proposed Ethereum scaling strategy” in an X post, though he made clear the architecture is still under development.
Bitcoiners deserve a lot of credit for pioneering many of these ideas (see Utreexo).
But yes, this is what the current proposed Ethereum scaling strategy looks like in action.
We want Ethereum to have the best of UTXO-style state, dynamic state, and everything in between,…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 16, 2026
His comments do not mean Ethereum is replacing its account model with Bitcoin’s UTXO system. The designs remain research proposals, not approved protocol changes.
What Is Utreexo?
Utreexo was introduced by MIT Digital Currency Initiative researcher Thaddeus Dryja in 2019. Instead of requiring nodes to store the full Bitcoin UTXO set, it uses a compact hash-based accumulator. Transaction inputs carry inclusion proofs that let nodes verify outputs against that accumulator.
The accumulator grows logarithmically with the underlying set. This addresses a core problem Ethereum researchers are also looking at: growing network activity without forcing storage requirements to grow at the same pace.
Utreexo remains a Bitcoin scaling project. Ethereum is not copying it directly, but drawing lessons from it.
Ethereum’s Native UTXO Proposal
On July 6, Ethereum researcher Toni Wahrstätter proposed adding native UTXO-like payments to Ethereum without removing accounts. The model targets one-shot payments that do not require persistent smart-contract state.
The proposal estimates these workloads could reduce permanent state usage by roughly 99.8%. At one billion entries, it estimates around 300 MB of permanent state, compared to 100 GB to 150 GB for equivalent account entries.
Those are design estimates, not measured mainnet results.
Rather than storing full payment objects in active state, Ethereum would prove their existence from history while keeping only a compact spent-status bit.
Recursive STARKs and Bandwidth
Buterin’s separate recursive-STARK mempool research, published in January, tackles proof bandwidth. His model uses STARK proofs of around 128 kB and proposes that mempool nodes periodically combine validity proofs recursively.
Using eight peers and 500-millisecond aggregation intervals as an example, extra bandwidth would total about 2 MB per second per node and stay constant as more objects enter the scheme.
Some community members extrapolated this into an architecture capable of settling an “unbounded volume” of UTXO transitions. Buterin’s research does not confirm unlimited transaction capacity. That is not a roadmap commitment.
What Comes Next
The native UTXO proposal depends on EIP-8141, or Frame Transactions. That proposal is currently only listed as “Considered for Inclusion” in Hegotá, Ethereum’s next major upgrade scheduled for 2027.
Native UTXOs are not currently listed as a scheduled Hegotá feature. Buterin’s Utreexo reference points to a research direction, not a confirmed upgrade date.
