Original Title: Simplifying the L1
Original Author: Vitalik Buterin
Translated by: Asher (@Asher_0210)
Editor's Note: Once upon a time, Bitcoin amazed us - a protocol that a high school student could understand, yet could support the operation of a global decentralized financial system. Looking back at Ethereum, the once-promised "world computer" is now trapped by complexity: from the cumbersome virtual machine, difficult-to-maintain consensus mechanism, to layered pre-compiled contracts, data structures, and Gas mechanisms. It's time to start over and bring Ethereum back to a concise track, not just scalable, but also comprehensible, maintainable, and verifiable.
Ethereum's goal is to become the world's ledger - a platform carrying civilizational assets and records, a base protocol supporting critical infrastructure such as finance, governance, and high-value data certification. To realize this vision, it must balance two core capabilities: scalability and resilience.
The Fusaka hard fork will bring a 10-fold improvement to the L2 data space, and the 2026 roadmap also plans similar expansion for L1. Meanwhile, Merge has transitioned Ethereum to PoS consensus, client diversity has rapidly improved, research on ZK verifiability and quantum attack resistance continues, and the application layer is becoming increasingly powerful. But beyond capacity and performance, there is another easily overlooked yet equally important foundation of resilience: protocol simplicity.
Simplicity is the Ultimate Shield of Decentralization
What makes Bitcoin most admirable is the extreme simplicity of its protocol:
The blockchain consists of a series of blocks;
Each block is linked to the previous block through a hash;
Blocks are verified by PoW, i.e., checking if the first few digits of its hash are 0;
Each block contains transactions that consume coins generated by mining or previous transactions.
A code-savvy high school student can completely understand the operating principle of the Bitcoin protocol, and a programmer can even implement a client as a hobby project. This simplicity brings the following benefits:
Easier to be widely understood, lowering research and development barriers, preventing domination by "technical bureaucrats";
Reducing the cost of developing new clients, validators, tools, and other interface infrastructures;
Reducing long-term maintenance complexity;
Lowering the risk of major security vulnerabilities and making protocol correctness easier to verify;
Reducing the social attack surface manipulated by special interests.
Historically, Ethereum has not done well in this aspect, leading to unnecessary development costs, security risks, and a closed research culture. In the next five years, Ethereum has the potential to become almost as simple as Bitcoin, which we can approach from two levels: the consensus layer and the execution layer.
Simplifying the Consensus Layer
The future new consensus mechanism (previously called beam chain) integrates the deep accumulation of consensus theory, ZK-SNARK, and staking economics over the past decade. Its goal is to build a long-term optimal and significantly simplified consensus layer, with key measures including:
Three-slot finality mechanism: Removing the complex logic of slots and epochs;No longer needing committee shuffle or sync committee mechanisms;Basically can be written in about 200 lines of code;Closer to optimal security compared to the current Gasper protocol.
Simplified fork choice and network structure: Fewer active validators allow simpler fork selection rules; STARK aggregation allows anyone to be an aggregator without trust and complex payments; more robust p2p architecture.
Simplified state transition logic: Redesigning validators' joining, exiting, withdrawal, and key switching mechanisms; reducing code complexity and more clearly expressing key behavioral cycles of subjectivity.
The advantage of the consensus layer is its relative independence from EVM execution, allowing more freedom for these upgrades. The real difficulty lies in simplifying the execution layer.
Simplifying the Execution Layer
The execution layer is the true "gathering place of black magic": complex EVM instruction set, lengthy and incomprehensible pre-compiled contracts, non-extensible SELFDESTRUCT, and heavy historical compatibility burden. Therefore,replacing EVM with a concise, high-performance, ZK-native friendly VM like RISC-V has the following advantages:
Direct performance improvement of 100 times;
Seamless integration with mainstream programming languages;
Natively runnable on zero-knowledge proof systems;
Clear static structure, conducive to auditing and security verification;
Almost no pre-compiled contracts needed, and even quantum-resistant algorithms can be natively deployed in the future.
However, migration is not a hard "hard fork", but allowing old contracts to continue running in an EVM interpreter, which itself is a contract written in RISC-V. Just as Apple used Rosetta to transition to ARM chips, Ethereum can upgrade its virtual machine painlessly.
Shared Components to Build a More Elegant System Foundation
The future Ethereum protocol should integrate more "shared components" to fundamentally reduce system complexity:
Unified erasure coding: Used for data availability sampling, historical storage, P2P broadcast acceleration, avoiding repeated design;
Unified serialization format (SSZ): Similar to current ABI, compatible but more efficient, facilitating L2 decoupling;
Unified state tree structure (binary tree): More suitable for ZK proofs, faster, and simpler.
This means that Ethereum's underlying structure will no longer be composed of "various patched compromises" but truly built as "protocol building blocks" with engineering aesthetics.
Complexity Reaching Its End is the Best Time to Start Simplifying
Simplicity is similar to decentralization in many aspects, both being upstream values leading to system resilience. Truly valuing simplicity requires a cultural shift, with benefits often difficult to quantify immediately, while the cost of abandoning flashy features and putting in extra effort is immediately apparent. However, the value of simplicity will gradually become evident over time, with Bitcoin being the best example.
Drawing inspiration from tinygrad's approach, setting a maximum line count goal for Ethereum's long-term specification consensus code aims to make the complexity of the consensus critical path as close as possible to Bitcoin's simplicity. Historical rule-related logic will still be retained but isolated outside the consensus path. At the same time, the overall design should adhere to the principle of "prioritizing simpler solutions", leaning towards local encapsulation rather than systemic complexity, and prioritizing architectural choices with clear attributes and verifiability.
