Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin Proposes “Simplicity” as the Core Path for Blockchain Scalability and Resilience
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently published a technical article, proposing “simplicity” as the core approach to the future scalability and resilience of blockchain. He further suggested that the Ethereum mainnet should gradually transition from the current Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to a more efficient and easily verifiable new architecture, such as RISC-V, or even possibly Cairo, in the coming years to achieve comprehensive protocol simplification.
Vitalik Draws on Bitcoin’s Simplicity Characteristics
Vitalik Buterin pointed out that Ethereum has made significant achievements in scalability and application flexibility in the past, such as the Fusaka hard fork, which will greatly enhance L2 data space, and the completion of the Merge that shifted the public chain to Proof of Stake (PoS), while continuing to advance zero-knowledge verifiability and resistance to quantum computing mechanisms. However, to truly become a globally trusted financial and data infrastructure, “protocol simplicity” will be an underestimated yet indispensable key.
Vitalik Buterin stated that much of Bitcoin’s success comes from its simplicity: a single chain, a series of blocks, and each block verified through a simple proof-of-work mechanism, which almost any developer can understand or even re-implement. In contrast, Ethereum’s adoption of a more complex virtual machine, numerous precompiled functions, and historical baggage has raised the development barrier for new clients, reduced the number of protocol participants, and even led to excessive governance centralization.
What are the benefits of making Ethereum simpler?
- Enabling more people to understand and participate in the research, development, and governance of the protocol, thereby reducing elite monopolization caused by technical barriers.
- Lowering development and integration costs, such as for new clients, new ZK provers, and new developer tools.
- Reducing long-term maintenance costs.
- Lowering systemic vulnerability risks, making bugs easier to discover and fix.
- Reducing the social attack surface: the fewer components there are, the less likely they are to be controlled by special interests.
He admitted that the currently overly complex protocol structure of Ethereum partially stems from his own design decisions and called for future priorities to be placed on simplicity, making the protocol not only easy to understand, participate in, and verify but also enhancing security and development efficiency.
Simplification Blueprint from Consensus Layer to Execution Layer
Vitalik Buterin described several major simplification proposals that Ethereum could implement over the next five years, covering both the consensus layer and the execution layer. During last year’s Devcon in Bangkok, he proposed the Beam Chain solution. Beam Chain seeks to integrate experiences from the past decade in consensus theory, ZK-SNARKs, and staking economics to create a more long-term, optimized consensus layer. However, the new consensus layer is simpler than the current Beacon Chain.
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Consensus Layer Simplification:
- Adoption of three-slot finality, removing the distinction between slots and epochs, committee shuffling mechanisms, and synchronization committees, with basic implementation requiring only about 200 lines of code and achieving near-optimal security.
- Utilization of STARK aggregation proofs, allowing anyone to serve as an aggregator without needing a trusted central role.
- Restructuring the validator mechanism, including entry, exit, withdrawal, and inactive penalties, to simplify program logic and ensure rules.
The execution layer restructuring focuses on discarding the current EVM and transitioning to RISC-V virtual machines or other ZK-friendly VMs, achieving over 100 times performance improvement. Vitalik stated that this would bring fundamental efficiency gains because smart contracts could execute directly within provers, eliminating interpreter overhead. Compared to EVM, RISC-V is significantly simpler and provides developers with more options, allowing Solidity and Vyper to add backends to compile to the new virtual machine.
He mentioned that if RISC-V is chosen, developers using more mainstream languages would be able to port their code to the VM, eliminating the need for most precompiled functions while retaining a few high-performance requirements (like elliptic curves), which might also be removed as quantum computers emerge.
Vitalik Encourages Ethereum to Set a Code Line Limit to Practice Minimalism
At the end of the article, Vitalik Buterin urged the Ethereum community to view “simplicity” as a principle akin to decentralization, being the source of protocol resilience. He suggested that Ethereum could take inspiration from the AI project tinygrad and establish a clear “maximum line of code limit” to encourage subtractive design in protocol logic and avoid mixing non-consensus necessary historical logic into the main flow.
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