Vitalik's new article: Returning to simplicity, the future of Ethereum doesn't need to be so complicated.

*Original Title: *Simplifying the L1

Original Author: Vitalik Buterin

Compiled by: Asher (**@Asher_ 0210 )

Editor’s Note: Once upon a time, Bitcoin amazed us—a protocol understandable even to a high school student, yet capable of supporting the operation of a global decentralized financial system. As we look back at Ethereum, the promised "world computer" is now trapped by complexity: from the cumbersome virtual machine, the difficult-to-maintain consensus mechanism, to the layered precompiled contracts, data structures, and Gas mechanism. It’s time to set off again, to bring Ethereum back to a simple track, not just scalable, but also understandable, maintainable, and verifiable.

The goal of Ethereum is to become the world ledger – a platform for carrying civilization assets and records, supporting key infrastructure such as finance, governance, and high-value data certification as its underlying protocol. To achieve this vision, two core capabilities must be balanced: scalability and resilience.

The Fusaka hard fork will bring a 10-fold increase in L2 data space, and the 2026 roadmap also plans for similar expansion for L1. Meanwhile, the Merge has transitioned Ethereum to PoS consensus, leading to a rapid improvement in client diversity, ongoing research into ZK verifiability and resistance to quantum attacks, and an increasingly robust application layer. However, aside from scalability and performance, there is another easily overlooked but equally important foundation of resilience: the simplicity of the protocol.

Simplicity is the ultimate shield of decentralization.

One of the most impressive aspects of Bitcoin is the extreme simplicity of its protocol:

• The blockchain consists of a chain of blocks;
• Each block is linked to the previous block through a hash;
• Blocks are validated through PoW, which checks whether the first few digits of their hash are 0;
• Each block contains transactions, and the consumption of transactions is generated by mining or previous transactions.

A high school student who understands coding can fully grasp the operation principles of the Bitcoin protocol, and a programmer can even implement the client as a personal project; this simplicity brings the following benefits:

• More easily understood, lowering the barriers to research and development, and preventing domination by "technocrats";
• Reduce the cost of developing new client, validator, tool and other interface infrastructure;
• Reduce the complexity of long-term maintenance;
• Reduce the risk of major security vulnerabilities and make it easier to verify protocol correctness;
• Reduce the social attack surface manipulated by special interests.

Historically, Ethereum has not performed ideally in this regard, 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 streamlined as Bitcoin, and we can approach this from two levels: the consensus layer and the execution layer.

Simplified Consensus Layer

The new consensus mechanism of the future (formerly known as the beam chain) integrates deep insights from the past decade on consensus theory, ZK-SNARK, staking economics, and more. Its goal is to create a long-term optimal and significantly simplified consensus layer, with key initiatives including:

• 3-slot finality: Removes the complex logic of slots and epochs; no longer requires mechanisms like committee shuffle and synchronized committees; can be implemented with approximately 200 lines of code; offers security closer to optimal compared to the current Gasper protocol.
• Simplified fork choice and network structure: Fewer active validators allow for simpler fork choice rules; STARK aggregation enables anyone to become an aggregator without trust and complex payments; a more robust p2p architecture.
• Simplify state transition related logic: redesign mechanisms for validators joining, exiting, withdrawing, and key switching; reduce code complexity and clearly express key behaviors such as subjectivity cycles.

The benefit of the consensus layer is its relative independence from EVM execution, allowing for more freedom in these upgrades. The real challenge lies in how to simplify the execution layer.

Simplified Execution Layer

The execution layer is the true "black magic gathering place": complex EVM instruction set, lengthy and obscure precompiled contracts, difficult to scale SELFDESTRUCT, and an overly heavy historical compatibility burden. Therefore, replacing the EVM with a concise, high-performance, ZK-native friendly VM, such as RISC-V, has the following advantages:

• Performance directly improved by 100 times;
• Seamless integration with mainstream programming languages;
• Can be natively run on zero-knowledge proof systems;
• The static structure is clear, which is beneficial for auditing and security verification;
• Almost no need for precompiled contracts, and in the future, even quantum-resistant algorithms can be natively deployed.

But the migration is not a hard "hard fork"; instead, it allows the old contracts to continue running on an EVM interpreter, which is itself a contract written in RISC-V. Just as Apple transitioned to ARM chips using Rosetta, Ethereum can upgrade its virtual machine painlessly.

Shared components to create a more elegant system foundation

The future Ethereum protocol should integrate more "shared components" to significantly reduce system complexity:

• Unified erasure coding: used for data availability sampling, historical storage, P2P broadcasting acceleration, avoiding redundant design;
• Standardized Serialization Format (SSZ): Similar to the current ABI, it is well compatible but more efficient, facilitating L2 decoupling;
• Unified state tree structure (binary tree): more suitable for ZK proofs, faster, and simpler.

This means that the Ethereum underlying is no longer made up of "various patched compromises," but rather constructed as "protocol building blocks" with true engineering aesthetics.

When complexity reaches its end, it is the best time to start simplifying.

Simplicity is similar to decentralization in many ways; both are upstream values leading to system resilience. Truly valuing simplicity requires a cultural shift, as its benefits are often difficult to quantify immediately, while the costs of sacrificing flashy features and making extra efforts become apparent right away. However, over time, the value of simplicity will gradually become evident, with Bitcoin being the best example.

Borrowing from Tinygrad's ideas, setting a target for the maximum number of lines of consensus code for Ethereum's long-term specification aims to bring the complexity of the consensus critical path as close to Bitcoin's simplicity as possible. The logic associated with historical rules will still be preserved, but should be isolated from the non-consensus path. At the same time, the overall design should adhere to the concept of "giving preference to simpler solutions", favor local packaging rather than systemic complexity, and give priority to those architectural choices with clear attributes and verifiability.