Vitalik Buterin is calling for deliberate protocol simplification and “garbage collection,” warning that Ethereum must start removing complexity to preserve trustlessness and long-term self-sovereignty.
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Hassan Shittu
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Hassan Shittu
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Hassan, a Cryptonews.com journalist with 6+ years of experience in Web3 journalism, brings deep knowledge across Crypto, Web3 Gaming, NFTs, and Play-to-Earn sectors. His work has appeared in...
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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is warning that Ethereum risks becoming an “unwieldy mess” unless developers begin actively simplifying the protocol instead of continuously adding new features.
In a post published on X on Sunday, Buterin said Ethereum’s biggest threat is not competition but internal complexity.
He argued that decentralization, trustlessness, and self-sovereignty lose their meaning if the protocol becomes so complex that only a small group of experts can understand or maintain it.
His remarks come as Ethereum is simultaneously posting record transaction activity and historically low fees.
Buterin Calls Out ‘Protocol Bloat’ in Ethereum’s Codebase.
Buterin noted that even a network with hundreds of thousands of nodes and strong fault tolerance fails its core mission if its codebase grows into multiple layers of advanced cryptography that few people can audit.
At the center of his concern is what he describes as protocol bloat.
Ethereum’s development process, he said, has historically favored adding features while rarely removing old ones, largely to preserve backward compatibility.
Over time, this leads to a protocol that grows heavier, harder to reason about, and more fragile.
Buterin warned that such complexity undermines security, raises the barrier for new client teams, and weakens Ethereum’s ability to survive if current core developers step away.
To counter this trend, Buterin called for an explicit “simplification” or “garbage collection” function within Ethereum’s development process.
He said simplification should focus on reducing total lines of code, minimizing reliance on complex cryptographic dependencies, and introducing stronger invariants that make client behavior more predictable.
Buterin Outlines Plan to Strip Complexity From Ethereum.
He pointed to past changes such as the removal of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode and transaction gas caps as examples of how carefully chosen constraints can make the protocol easier to implement and safer to operate.
Buterin also outlined larger-scale cleanup options, including moving rarely used or complex features out of the core protocol and into smart contracts.
Under this approach, legacy transaction types, precompiles, and even the Ethereum Virtual Machine itself could eventually be demoted from mandatory protocol components, allowing new clients to focus on a simpler core.
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