Vitalik Buterin aims to simplify Ethereum like Bitcoin in 5 years

Vitalik Buterin hopes that Ethereum will match Bitcoin’s simplicity within the next five years.

Aiming to make Ethereum more efficient and manageable, Vitalik proposed a new architectural approach along with ecosystem-wide standards.

Inspired by Bitcoin’s minimalist design, Vitalik Buterin urged a reduction in complexity within Ethereum’s base protocol to boost its efficiency, security, and ease of use.

In his May 3 blog post “Simplifying the L1,” Buterin detailed a strategy to rework Ethereum’s structure, focusing on its consensus mechanism, execution layer, and shared modules.

Buterin wrote, “This post will describe how Ethereum 5 years from now can become close to as simple as Bitcoin,” highlighting that simplicity plays a key role in Ethereum’s long-term scalability and robustness.

While Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake (PoS) and the integration of zk-SNARKs have enhanced its robustness, Buterin highlighted that these technical complexities have also caused prolonged development cycles, elevated expenses, and an increased risk of bugs.

“Historically, Ethereum has often not done this (sometimes because of my own decisions), and this has contributed to much of our excessive development expenditure, all kinds of security risk, and insularity of R&D culture, often in pursuit of benefits that have proven illusory.”

The “3-slot finality” model, which eliminates components like epochs, sync committees, and validator shuffling, plays a pivotal role in Ethereum’s ongoing efforts to streamline its consensus layer.

“The reduced number of active validators at a time means that it becomes safer to use simpler implementations of the fork choice rule,” Buterin wrote.

To further enhance Ethereum, Buterin proposed adopting clearer fork choice rules and utilizing STARK-based aggregation protocols to improve decentralization and simplify the process of network coordination.

In his proposal for the execution layer, Buterin recommended replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with a more streamlined, ZK-friendly virtual machine such as RISC-V.

Adopting this approach could result in a 100x performance gain for zero-knowledge proofs and a significant reduction in the complexity of the protocol.

RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture used to develop custom processors for a variety of applications, from embedded designs to supercomputers.

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Its minimalist design philosophy centers on using a concise set of simple instructions, ensuring both high efficiency and easier implementation.

Buterin’s proposal includes running legacy EVM contracts on-chain through a RISC-V interpreter, allowing both virtual machines to function together during the transitional period to maintain backward compatibility.

In addition, Buterin proposed implementing protocol-wide standards.

To reduce unnecessary complexity, he proposed standardizing Ethereum’s tooling and infrastructure with one erasure coding method, SSZ as the serialization format, and a consistent tree structure.

“Simplicity is in many ways similar to decentralization,” Buterin wrote.

To ensure greater transparency and efficiency, Buterin recommended that Ethereum follow a “max line-of-code” strategy, inspired by Tinygrad, to keep consensus-related logic streamlined and auditable.

Legacy features that aren’t critical would continue to exist, but they would stay separate from the core specification.

This proposed architectural change comes amid a period of significant price underperformance for Ethereum.

Over the past 12 months, ETH has seen a 40% decrease in price, while Bitcoin enjoyed a 63% increase during the same period.

Vitalik Buterin expects the full transition to take as long as five years, meaning any short-term effects on prices may remain minimal.