Ethereum is not "becoming more complex", but "capital is finally able to become simpler".
Original:Simplifying the L1
Author:Vitalik Buterin
Translated by:Asher
Cover:Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash
Editor's Note: Once upon a time, Bitcoin amazed us - a protocol that even 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 the 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 civilization's assets and records, a base protocol supporting critical infrastructure such as finance, governance, and high-value data certification.
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: the simplicity of the protocol.
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 via a hash;
- Blocks are verified through 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 high school student who understands coding can completely comprehend Bitcoin's protocol operation, 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 thresholds, preventing domination by "technical bureaucrats";
- Reducing the cost of developing new clients, validators, and tool 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 concise 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: Remove the complex logic of slots and epochs; no longer need committee shuffle or sync committee; 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 become an aggregator without trust and complex payments; more robust p2p architecture.
- Simplified state transition logic: Redesign mechanisms for validator joining, exiting, withdrawal, and key switching; reduce code complexity and more clearly express key behavioral cycles.
The advantage of the consensus layer is its relative independence from EVM execution, allowing more freedom for these upgrades. The real challenge 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 obscure pre-compiled contracts, non-scalable SELFDESTRUCT, and heavy historical compatibility burden. Therefore, replacing the EVM with a concise, high-performance, ZK-native friendly VM like RISC-V has advantages such as:
- Performance directly improved by 100 times;
- Seamless integration with mainstream programming languages;
- Can natively run on zero-knowledge proof systems;
- Clear static structure, conducive to audit and security verification;
- Almost no need to pre-compile contracts, and even quantum-resistant algorithms can be natively deployed in the future.
However, the migration is not a hard "Hard Fork", but allows old contracts to continue running in an EVM interpreter, and this interpreter 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 the current ABI, compatible and more efficient, conducive to L2 decoupling;
- Unified state tree structure (binary tree): More suitable for ZK proofs, faster, and simpler.
This means that the Ethereum underlying layer is no longer composed of "various patched compromises", but truly built with "protocol building blocks" through engineering aesthetics.
When Complexity Reaches Its Limit, It's the Best Time to Start Simplifying
Conciseness is similar to decentralization in many aspects, both being upstream values leading to system resilience. Truly valuing conciseness requires a cultural shift, and its benefits are often difficult to quantify immediately, while abandoning flashy features and putting in extra effort are immediately apparent. However, as time passes, the value of conciseness will gradually emerge, 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, aiming to make the complexity of the critical consensus path as close as possible to Bitcoin's concise level. Historical rule-related logic will still be retained but should be isolated outside the consensus path. At the same time, the overall design should adhere to the principle of "prioritizing simpler solutions", favoring local encapsulation over systemic complexity, and prioritizing architectural choices with clear attributes and verifiability.
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