Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said the network must undergo significant simplification to maintain its long term trustless and self sovereign foundations.
Buterin argued that Ethereum has become overly complex over time, weakening both security and resilience. While adding new features may deliver short term functionality, he warned that this approach can harm the protocol’s long term durability, making deliberate simplification essential in the development process.
According to Buterin, systems built on massive codebases, intricate cryptographic dependencies and knowledge limited to a small group of experts fail key tests of trustlessness. Such complexity makes it difficult for new teams to maintain the protocol and prevents users from fully auditing it as their own system, while also increasing the risk of security vulnerabilities.
As a solution, Buterin proposed reducing total code, avoiding unnecessary technical dependencies and introducing stronger invariants within the protocol. He described the shift from proof of work to proof of stake as a major cleanup effort and suggested that similar large scale simplifications could follow, stressing that Ethereum’s future depends on becoming simpler, clearer and more robust.
