Vitalik Buterin Wants Ethereum as Simple as Bitcoin
07 May, 2025 ● Crypto people
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed simplifying the blockchain’s foundational protocol to enhance its efficiency, security, and accessibility.
Drawing inspiration from the streamlined architecture of Bitcoin, his goal is to make Ethereum easier to maintain and scale over the long term.
In a May 3 blog post titled “Simplifying the L1,” Buterin outlined a plan to overhaul Ethereum’s structure across its consensus, execution, and shared components.
“This post will describe how Ethereum 5 years from now can become close to as simple as Bitcoin,” Buterin wrote, emphasizing that embracing simplicity is essential to Ethereum’s durability and future growth.
While upgrades like proof-of-stake and the integration of zk-SNARKs have improved Ethereum’s capabilities, Buterin acknowledged that increasing technical complexity has introduced longer development timelines, higher costs, and more vulnerability to bugs:
“Historically, Ethereum has often not done this (sometimes because of my own decisions), and this has contributed to much of our excessive development expenditure, all kinds of security risk, and insularity of R&D culture, often in pursuit of benefits that have proven illusory.”
A major focus of the proposal is Ethereum’s consensus layer. At the heart of the suggested changes is the concept of “3-slot finality,” which would eliminate several complex elements such as epochs, sync committees, and validator shuffling.
“The reduced number of active validators at a time means that it becomes safer to use simpler implementations of the fork choice rule,” Buterin wrote.
Other proposed enhancements include simplifying fork choice logic and introducing STARK-based aggregation to improve decentralization and coordination without increasing complexity.
On the execution side, Buterin proposed replacing the current Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with a more minimal, zero-knowledge-proof-friendly system such as RISC-V.
This would dramatically improve ZK proof performance—potentially by a factor of 100—and reduce protocol complexity.
RISC-V is an open-source processor architecture that uses a small set of basic instructions, following a minimalist philosophy aimed at boosting efficiency and ease of use.
To maintain support for existing smart contracts, Buterin proposed continuing to run EVM contracts via an on-chain RISC-V interpreter, allowing both systems to coexist during a transition period.
Buterin also called for standardizing several protocol elements across Ethereum.
He recommended choosing a single erasure coding method, unifying around the SSZ serialization format, and adopting a consistent tree structure to eliminate unnecessary complexity and simplify Ethereum’s infrastructure.
“Simplicity is in many ways similar to decentralization,” Buterin wrote. He advocated for Ethereum to implement a “max line-of-code” threshold like the one used in Tinygrad, to keep consensus-critical parts of the codebase lean and easier to audit.
He noted that non-essential legacy features would still be supported but would live outside the core specification.
Buterin’s drive to simplify Ethereum’s architecture comes as the blockchain’s dominance continues to erode in the face of competition from other networks.
During a panel at the LONGITUDE by Cointelegraph event on May 2, Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik commented on Ethereum’s shrinking influence in the Layer 1 ecosystem.
“If you’d asked me 3–4 years ago whether Ethereum would dominate crypto, I’d have said yes,” Svanevik said during a panel discussion at the LONGITUDE by Cointelegraph event. “But now, it’s clear that’s not what’s happening.”
Sources:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalikbuterin-ethereum-simplification-bitcoin-inspired-redesign
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/05/03/simplel1.html
