Vitalik Buterin Advocates ‘Garbage Collection’ To Reduce Ethereum’s Complexity And Strengthen Self-Sovereignty

In Brief

Vitalik Buterin said Ethereum’s long-term trustlessness and self-sovereignty depend on protocol simplicity, calling for an explicit simplification and “garbage collection” to reduce bloat, strengthen invariants, and slow core changes over time.

In a recent post on the social media platform X, Vitalik Buterin argued that increasing complexity within the protocol undermines its foundational principles, and he called for a deliberate process of simplification and “garbage collection” to reduce code bloat, reinforce core invariants, and slow the pace of critical changes over time.

He highlighted that even a highly decentralized protocol with extensive node participation and strong byzantine fault tolerance can fail in fundamental ways if its structure becomes overly complex. He further explained that a protocol cluttered with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and multiple layers of advanced cryptography can fail key measures of trustlessness, walkaway resilience, and self-sovereignty. In such cases, users must rely on a small group of experts to interpret protocol properties, new teams struggle to maintain or replicate the system’s quality, and even technically sophisticated participants may find it impossible to fully inspect or control the protocol.

The Ethereum co-founder also noted that complexity increases security risks, as intricate interactions between protocol components can create potential failure points. He cautioned against adding features solely to address short-term needs, explaining that even beneficial additions can introduce new cryptographic dependencies or interacting elements that compromise long-term self-sovereignty. Vitalik Buterin framed this as a threat to Ethereum’s potential as a durable, decentralized infrastructure capable of enduring for decades or even centuries.

Vitalik Buterin Outlines Ethereum Simplification Framework To Reduce Complexity And Preserve Long-Term Trustlessness

According to him, the current development approach, which tends to favor additive changes over subtractions to preserve backward compatibility, contributes to inevitable protocol bloat over time. To address this, he proposed establishing a formalized “simplification” or “garbage collection” function within Ethereum’s development process, aimed at pruning unnecessary complexity and preserving the protocol’s long-term trustless and self-sovereign properties.

Vitalik Buterin has outlined a framework for “simplification” within the Ethereum protocol, emphasizing three primary objectives

The first is to minimize the overall lines of code, with the ideal protocol fitting onto a single page or at least remaining compact and comprehensible. The second is to limit reliance on complex technical components, favoring designs whose security depends on simple mechanisms, such as a single hash function, rather than multiple intricate cryptographic constructs. The third objective is to increase the number of core invariants—protocol properties that can be relied upon for predictable behavior. Examples include EIP-6780, which restricts storage slot changes to simplify client development, and EIP-7825, which caps transaction processing costs, facilitating more efficient parallel execution and support for ZK-EVMs.

Vitalik Buterin described “garbage collection” as a process that can occur on either a piecemeal or large-scale basis. Incremental improvements involve streamlining existing features to reduce complexity and improve clarity. A case in point is the gas cost reforms implemented in Glamsterdam, which replaced previously arbitrary costs with a system tied to clear, measurable resource consumption. Large-scale transformations have included the shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, and future initiatives, such as the Lean consensus upgrade, are expected to allow for simultaneous correction of multiple protocol inefficiencies.

Another approach, which he refers to as “Rosetta-style backwards compatibility,” involves preserving complex but rarely used features in a demoted form, where they are implemented as smart contract code rather than mandatory protocol elements. This allows new client developers to avoid handling outdated or infrequently used components. For example, after the full implementation of native account abstraction, legacy transaction types could be retired, with externally owned accounts converted into smart contract wallets capable of processing those transactions. Similarly, existing precompiles could be replaced with EVM or RISC-V code, and eventually, the virtual machine itself could transition from EVM to a simpler architecture, with the original EVM maintained as a smart contract within the new environment.

The developer emphasized the importance of reducing the burden on client developers, suggesting that older protocol versions could continue running in isolated containers, allowing them to maintain compatibility without complicating ongoing development. In his view, Ethereum’s first fifteen years represent an exploratory phase, akin to adolescence, during which the network tested numerous ideas to determine what is effective and sustainable. The long-term goal is to slow the rate of protocol changes and eliminate elements that are no longer useful, ensuring that unnecessary complexity does not permanently hinder Ethereum’s evolution.