- Vitalik Buterin urges developers to remove legacy features and simplify the protocol to fight Ethereum bloat.
- He warns complexity undermines trustlessness, prevents rebuilding clients, and weakens self-sovereignty.
- Buterin proposes an explicit “simplification” or “garbage collection” step in development to cut code, limit exotic cryptography, and add invariants.
- Past cleanups cited include the move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and recent gas cost reforms; future cleanups could shift rare features into smart contracts.
- Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana Labs counters that blockchains must keep evolving to meet developer and user needs.
On Sunday, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, urged developers to address protocol bloat caused by adding new features without removing old ones, arguing simplicity is essential for trustlessness and self-sovereignty, as stated in a Sunday post. He said that even deep decentralization can fail if the protocol becomes an unwieldy mess.
“Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and it has 49% byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes fully verify everything with quantum-safe peerdas and starks, if the protocol is an unwieldy mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of PhD-level cryptography, ultimately that protocol fails,” he claimed. Buterin said this complexity forces users to rely on expert interpreters and makes independent verification impractical.
He outlined three specific harms: weakened trustlessness because users must consult “high priests” to understand the system; failure of the “walkaway test” since rebuilding high-quality clients would be unrealistic if current teams vanish; and erosion of self-sovereignty because even technical users cannot inspect the whole system.
Buterin called for an explicit “simplification” or “garbage collection” function in Ethereum’s development process. He said upgrades judged mainly by backward compatibility bias decisions toward additions, making the protocol heavier over time. The proposed cleanup would reduce total lines of code, limit reliance on complex cryptographic primitives, and introduce more invariants to make client behavior easier to predict.
He pointed to past large-scale cleanups such as the shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and more recent gas cost reforms, noting future moves could demote rarely used features from the core protocol into smart contracts. An illustration related to his remarks is available here.
In response, Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, said a blockchain must keep evolving to meet developer and user needs, arguing continuous iteration is essential even without a single steering group. Buterin has said Ethereum should aim to pass the “walkaway test” so it can operate securely and predictably for decades without ongoing developer intervention. Read the Editorial Policy.
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