Vitalik Buterin Argues That Ethereum Needs to Be Completely Overhauled: 'It Has Become Too Complex'

Source: CryptoNewsNet Original Title: Vitalik Buterin Argues That Ethereum Needs to Be Completely Overhauled: ‘It Has Become Too Complex’ Original Link: Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin stated that Ethereum’s long-term goals of trustlessness and self-sovereignty are directly linked to the protocol’s simplicity.

Buterin stated that the protocol’s increasing complexity over time weakened its security and resilience, and that Ethereum’s development process needed a clear “simplification” and “garbage collection” mechanism.

According to Buterin, a protocol, no matter how decentralized it is, fails three fundamental tests if it has hundreds of thousands of lines of code, numerous complex cryptographic dependencies, and a structure that only a narrow group of experts can understand. These are: it cannot be truly trustless, new development teams cannot maintain the system if the current teams disappear, and users cannot fully control the protocol as “their own system.” He also stated that this complexity increases security vulnerabilities due to the interactions between protocol components.

Buterin stated that Ethereum’s eagerness to add new features for short-term functionality gains during its development process could be detrimental in the long run, arguing that this approach contradicts the goal of a century-long, sustainable decentralized infrastructure. He said that the desire to maintain backward compatibility encourages additions but makes removals more difficult, thus inevitably leading to the protocol becoming “bloated.”

As a solution to this problem, he defined “simplification” with three key criteria: minimizing the total number of lines of code in the protocol as much as possible, avoiding unnecessarily complex technical dependencies, and adding more “invariants” that the protocol can rely on. As an example, he recalled that certain Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) significantly simplified client development and scalability.

Buterin stated that simplification could be both incremental and large-scale. Previously describing the transition from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS) as a major “garbage collection” effort, Buterin suggested that similar comprehensive cleanups could be implemented in the future through initiatives like “fine consensus.” He also indicated that some complex but underutilized features could be moved from being mandatory protocol components to smart contracts, thus relieving new client developers of this burden.

Buterin argued that the pace of change in Ethereum should slow down in the long term, describing the first fifteen years as a “period of experimentation and exploration.” He stated that elements that prove ineffective or provide limited benefit should not become a permanent burden on the protocol, and argued that ETH’s future depends on evolving into a simpler, more understandable, and more resilient structure.