Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin wants to simplify the system radically-according to Bitcoin principles
- Vitalik Buterin suggests simplifying Ethereum through a Bitcoin-like minimalism in order to increase security and reduce development costs.
- Ethereum could replace its vitettual machine with RISC-V and introduce a uniform infrastructure to slim down consensus, execution and data level.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is committed to a fundamental redesign of the Ethereum protocol to reduce its complexity and improve its long-term sustainability. In a recently published proposal, butterin argued that Ethereum was supposed to imitate the minimalist architecture of Bitcoin by slapping both the consensus and execution level. He suggested that maintaining a simpler protocol reduce the development effort, increase security and ensure wider participation in the development of the network.
Vitalik Buterin’s "Simplifying the L1" calls for a significant simplification of the Ethereum protocol in the next five years, drawing on Bitcoin’s minimalist design to reduce development costs and security risks caused by complexity. He also suggested setting a maximum code line…
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) May 3, 2025
Ethereum has developed into a platform that supports decentralized finance, data check, governance and digital assets. In order to maintain this role as a global ledger, the protocol must not only focus on scalability, but also on resistance. While the scalability loud a recent CNF post through upgrades such as the upcoming Fusaka-Hardfork and the improved Layer 2 support is approached but Bterin now shifts attention to a less visible problem: the Technical complexity.
Comparatively simple new consensus mechanism
The proposed “3-slot final” model aims to shift the consensus layer that is responsible for maintaining the integrity of the blockchain. All elements such as epochs, slot committees and Sync committees would be omitted and replaced by a simpler system, which could be implemented in only 200 lines of code (!). The new model should optimize security and make the protocol more developer -friendly.
Over and beyond hob Buterin the use of strong-based cryptographic aggregation to decentralize the validation tasks out. As a result, every knot can act as an aggregator without the need for trust, which reduces complexity and improves fault tolerance. It is expected that these changes will lead to a simpler and more resistant peer-to-peer architecture for Ethereum.
Radical redesign of the execution layer
Butterin also proposed to replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with an efficient and easier understandable system such as RISC-V or Cairo. According to him, the current EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) has accumulated “technical debts” in the form of insufficiently used opcodes and cryptographic precompiles. Due to the introduction of a new VM, Ethereum could achieve an increase in over 100 times-Sagar is 1000 times-for zero-knowledge-proofs and cancel the need for almost all of these precompiles.
In order to ensure compatibility with the old system, older EVM-based contracts according to butinin’s plan should finally be processed by an Onchain interpreter. Due to the secure shift of the complexity to non-consensus layers, the historical functionality would be retained and the core protocol would not be stressed.
The standardization of the infrastructure is another focus. Butterin proposed to introduce a single Erasure coding standard for data availability, the storage of the history and also P2P communication in order to save redundant code and use the resources economically. He also proposed to standardize the execution, consensus and contractual interfaces so that the SSZ series format finds greater distribution.
In the future, Ethereum could pass to a binary Merkle tree with optimized hashing in order to reduce the evidence costs and to improve the efficiency of the Light clients.
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