Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently published a technical article proposing 'simplicity' as the core route for future blockchain scalability and resilience. He further suggests that the Ethereum mainnet should gradually transition from the current EVM to a more efficient and easily verifiable new architecture, such as RISC-V, or even possibly Cairo, to achieve comprehensive protocol simplification.
Vitalik draws on Bitcoin's simplicity characteristics.
Vitalik Buterin pointed out that Ethereum has achieved many results in scalability and application flexibility in the past, such as the Fusaka hard fork which will significantly increase L2 data space, the completion of the Merge which shifted the public chain to proof-of-stake (PoS), and the continued advancement of zero-knowledge verifiability and anti-quantum computing mechanisms. However, to truly become a globally trusted financial and data infrastructure layer, 'protocol simplicity' will be an undervalued but essential key.
Vitalik Buterin states that a large part of Bitcoin's success comes from simplicity: one chain, one series of blocks, 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 bar for developing new clients, reduced the number of protocol participants, and even led to excessive governance centralization.
What are the benefits of making Ethereum simpler?
Allow more people to understand and participate in the research, development, and governance of the protocol, reducing elite monopolization caused by technical barriers.
Reduce development and integration costs, such as new client, new ZK prover, new developer tools.
Reduce long-term maintenance costs.
Lower systemic vulnerability risks, making bugs easier to detect and fix.
Reduce social attack surface: fewer components make it less susceptible to capture by special interests.
He acknowledged that Ethereum's currently overly complex protocol architecture partly stems from his own design decisions, and called for simplicity to be prioritized in the future, making the protocol not only easy to understand, participate in, and verify, but also enhancing security and development efficiency.
Blueprint for simplifying from consensus layer to execution layer
Vitalik Buterin described several major simplification proposals that Ethereum could implement in the next five years, covering both the consensus layer and execution layer. During last year's Devcon in Bangkok, the Beam Chain solution was proposed. Beam Chain attempts to integrate experiences from the past decade in consensus theory, ZK-SNARK, staking economics, etc., to create a more long-term and optimized consensus layer. However, the new consensus layer is simpler than the current Beacon Chain.
(The most ambitious Ethereum project, a quick overview of what Beam Chain mentioned by Justin Drake at Devcon in Bangkok is.)
Consensus layer simplification:
By adopting 3-slot finality, it eliminates the distinction between slots and epochs, committee shuffling mechanisms, and synchronized committees, with basic implementation requiring about 200 lines of code, and safety being nearly optimal.
Adoption of STARK aggregation proofs allows anyone to serve as an aggregator without requiring a trusted central role.
Reconstruct the validator mechanism, including entry, exit, withdrawal, and non-active penalties, to simplify program logic and rule guarantees.
The reconstruction of the execution layer focuses on abandoning the current EVM and transitioning to the RISC-V virtual machine or other ZK-friendly VMs to achieve over 100 times performance improvement. Vitalik states this can achieve fundamental efficiency gains, as smart contracts can be executed directly within the provers, saving interpreter overhead. Compared to EVM, RISC-V is very simple and provides developers with more options, allowing Solidity and Vyper to add backends to compile to the new virtual machine.
He stated that if RISC-V is chosen, then developers writing in more mainstream languages will be able to port their code to the VM. This also eliminates the need for most precompiled functions, retaining only a few high-performance requirements (such as elliptic curves), and may remove them after the advent of quantum computers.
(Ethereum heart surgery? Vitalik proposes that the Ethereum execution layer may completely replace the EVM with RISC-V.)
Vitalik encourages Ethereum to set a code line limit to practice minimalism.
At the end of the article, Vitalik Buterin urges the Ethereum community to regard 'simplicity' as a spirit, just as decentralization is the source of protocol resilience. He suggests that Ethereum could follow the AI project tinygrad in the future by setting a clear 'maximum code line limit' to encourage subtractive design in protocol logic and to avoid mixing unnecessary historical logic into the main process.
In this article, Vitalik proposes a minimalist Ethereum development blueprint to reduce technical debt and lower development barriers, first appearing in Chain News ABMedia.
