Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin urges developers to confront the protocol overload brought on by the countless push so as to add latest features and barely remove old ones.
In a Sunday post on X, Buterin argued that true trustlessness and self-sovereignty depend less on pure decentralization metrics and more on simplicity.
“Even if a protocol with a whole lot of 1000’s of nodes is super decentralized, has a Byzantine fault tolerance of 49%, and the nodes fully confirm the whole lot with quantum-safe Peerdas and Starks, if the protocol is an unwieldy mess of a whole lot of 1000’s of lines of code and five types of PhD-level cryptography, the protocol will ultimately fail,” he claimed
According to Buterin, this complexity undermines Ethereum (ETH) on three fronts. First, it weakens trustlessness by forcing users to depend on “high priests” to elucidate what the protocol actually does. Second, it fails the so-called walkaway test because rebuilding high-value customers becomes unrealistic when existing teams disappear. Third, it undermines self-sovereignty because even tech-savvy users can not inspect or think in regards to the system themselves.
Buterin calls for “garbage removal”
Buterin warned that the issue lies in how protocol changes are evaluated. When upgrades are judged totally on how disruptive they’re to existing systems, backwards compatibility tends to dominate decision making. The result’s a bias towards additions relatively than subtractions, causing the log to grow larger over time.
To counteract this, he called for an explicit “simplification” or “garbage collection” feature in Ethereum’s development process. The goal is to cut back the whole variety of lines of code, limit the reliance on complex cryptographic primitives, and introduce more invariants – hard rules that make it easier to predict and implement client behavior.
Buterin says Ethereum needs to be simplified like rocket engines. Source: Buterin
The Ethereum thought leader pointed to past changes as examples of effective cleanups. The transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) was a significant reset, while newer efforts, reminiscent of gas cost reform, aim to switch arbitrary rules with clearer links to actual resource usage. Future cleanups could include downgrading rarely used features from the core protocol into smart contracts, thereby reducing the burden on client developers.
The CEO of Solana Labs prefers a distinct approach
Meanwhile, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko says Solana (SOL) must remain in constant motion, arguing that a blockchain that stops evolving to satisfy the needs of developers and users risks becoming irrelevant. In response to a recent post by Buterin, Yakovenko claimed that continuous iteration is important to Solana's survival, even when no single group is answerable for driving these changes.
In contrast, Buterin argues that Ethereum should eventually pass the “walkaway test” and reach a degree where it will possibly operate safely and predictably for a long time without constant developer intervention.
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