"Ethereum has failed multiple times to keep things simple — sometimes due to my fault — and this has brought us unnecessary risks and costs," said Vitalik.
Vitalik Buterin (Source: Youtube)
The co-founder of Ethereum published a surprise proposal on Friday (3) revealing his ambition to radically restructure the protocol of the world's second-largest blockchain.
In a post with the short title: 'Simplifying L1', Vitalik Buterin argued that 'code simplicity' is the key to Ethereum's longevity, security, and accessibility — aiming for a design that approaches Bitcoin's minimalist philosophy.
He admitted that despite Ethereum's recent advancements, such as the migration to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and the incorporation of zk-SNARKs, ETH has become excessively complex.
According to him, this excess of technical sophistication has generated slow development cycles, higher operational costs, and security vulnerabilities.
"Ethereum has failed multiple times to keep things simple — sometimes due to my fault — and this has brought us unnecessary risks and costs," he wrote.
Vitalik admits guilt
Ethereum loses ground and founder proposes restructuring
The main front of changes suggested by Buterin is in the consensus layer. He presented a new model called '3-slot finality', which should eliminate technical concepts such as epochs and synchronization committees.
Such an approach would allow for a simpler selection of forks, with fewer active validators simultaneously.
Furthermore, he suggested that the network adopt technologies like STARKs — highly scalable zero-knowledge proofs — to facilitate aggregation and communication among validators, promoting more effective decentralization.
At the execution layer, Buterin proposed gradually migrating from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to an architecture based on the open standard RISC-V, widely used in processor design.
The new machine would be more compatible with zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), allowing performance improvements that could reach 100x, according to the founder.
During the transition, old contracts written for the EVM would be executed through a RISC-V interpreter, ensuring backward compatibility with current systems.
The goal, according to the post, is to facilitate the development of more efficient and secure decentralized applications without sacrificing the already built foundation.
Common standards and 'maximum code line': Ethereum wants to be readable and auditable
Vitalik also advocated for the creation of unified standards in the Ethereum ecosystem. He recommended that the community adopt a single serialization format (SSZ), standardized elimination methods, and a single tree structure, to make tools more interoperable and the codebase easier to audit.
Inspired by the Tinygrad project, Buterin suggested that Ethereum establish a 'maximum code line' — an explicit limit on the amount of code allowed in the critical consensus logic.
For him, this approach makes the system more auditable and trustworthy, even in extreme scenarios.
The timing of the announcement is not random. During the LONGITUDE event held last Friday (20), Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, stated that Ethereum's dominance among layer one (L1) networks has been decreasing.
"If you had asked me three or four years ago if Ethereum would dominate cryptocurrencies, I would have said yes. But now it's clear that this is not happening," he stated.
Rival blockchains like Solana, Avalanche, and others have attracted developers and users with simpler proposals and higher performance, intensifying the need for Ethereum to reinvent itself to maintain its relevance.
Finally, Buterin believes that just like decentralization, simplicity is a fundamental pillar of security and efficiency. By rethinking Ethereum's architecture based on this philosophy, the co-founder bets on the network's durability in an increasingly competitive and regulated environment.
If the community embraces the proposals, Ethereum could, in the next five years, become a lighter, more accessible, and robust network — without giving up its mission to serve as the foundation for the next generation of decentralized applications.