Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin urges developers to confront the protocol’s bloat resulting from the endless pressure to add recent features while infrequently removing venerable ones.
On Sunday post in
“Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes and has 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, and the nodes fully verify everything with quantum-secure peerds and starks, if the protocol is an unwieldy mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of PhD-level cryptography, ultimately the protocol fails,” he stated.
According to Buterin, this complexity undermines Ethereum (ETH) on three fronts. First, it weakens distrust by forcing users to rely on “high priests” to explain what the protocol actually does. Secondly, it does not pass the so-called walkaway test because it becomes unrealistic to rebuild high-quality customers if existing teams disappear. Third, it undermines sovereignty because even highly technical users can no longer independently examine or draw conclusions about the system.
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Buterin calls for “garbage collection”
Buterin cautioned that the problem stems from how changes to the protocol are assessed. When updates are judged primarily on how they disrupt existing systems, backward compatibility dominates decision-making. The result is a tendency to add rather than subtract, which causes the protocol to become more and more complex over time.
To counter this, he called for an explicit “simplification” or “garbage collection” feature in the Ethereum development process. The goal would be to reduce the total number of lines of code, reduce reliance on convoluted cryptographic primitives, and introduce more invariants – fixed rules that make it easier to predict and implement customer behavior.
Ethereum’s originator cited past changes as examples of effective cleansing. The shift from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS) was one large-scale reset, while newer efforts such as gas cost reforms aim to replace arbitrary rules with clearer links to actual resource operate. Future cleanups may include moving rarely used features from the base protocol to clever contracts, reducing the burden on client developers.
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The CEO of Solana Labs prefers a different approach
Meanwhile, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko says Solana (SOL) must remain in constant motion, arguing that a blockchain that stops evolving to meet the needs of developers and users could become irrelevant. In response to Buterin’s recent post, Yakovenko stated that constant iteration is crucial to Solana’s survival, even if no single group is responsible for driving these changes.
In contrast, Buterin argued that Ethereum should eventually pass a “pass test,” reaching a point where it can operate safely and predictably for decades without constant developer intervention.
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