Vitalik Buterin’s Five-Year Vision: Ethereum to Rival Bitcoin’s Simplicity

Ethereum’s co-founder drops a bombshell ambition: streamline the world’s smart contract platform to Bitcoin-level simplicity by 2030. The blockchain that brought us DeFi, NFTs, and endless gas fee debates might finally shed its complexity—or crash trying.

The roadmap: Buterin’s ’Ethereum Simplification Protocol’ (ESP) aims to slash technical debt, prune redundant layer-2 solutions, and make consensus mechanisms actually explainable at dinner parties. Critics call it ’code anorexia,’ while ETH maximalists cheer the purge.

Finance jab: Wall Street analysts predict this could either trigger a 10x developer exodus... or finally justify those institutional ETH staking products gathering dust at BlackRock.

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Ethereum Set Itself Apart From Bitcoin By Prioritizing Programmability, Flexibility, Rapid Evolution

Caring about simplicity is, like decentralization, a short-term cost for the sake of benefits that do not appear immediately. But in the long term, it will be worth it. Let’s make each part of the ethereum spec a place where things like this can happen:https://t.co/1yIiWfAbH8

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 3, 2025

Buterin’s message is clear- if Ethereum is to remain the backbone of decentralized finance and the next generation of internet applications, it must return to its roots and embrace radical simplicity.

He warned that “Ethereum has lost sight of simplicity, attempting to do too much while piling on technical debt,” he warns. Buterin thus advocated for a major reset. He pointed to Bitcoin’s “beautifully simple protocol” as a model, noting that even a smart high school student can understand Bitcoin’s CORE mechanics, while Ethereum’s complexity now requires deep expertise and specialized teams to manage and audit. 

The EVM, Ethereum’s execution engine, has become bloated and difficult to optimize. Buterin proposes replacing it with RISC-V, a minimalist virtual machine already proven in zero-knowledge cryptography projects. “I suggested we replace the EVM with either RISC-V, or another VM that is the VM that Ethereum ZK-provers will be written in,” wrote Buterin.

Buterin also called for merging redundant tools and adopting more efficient cryptographic methods, such as unified erasure coding and binary Merkle trees.

Key Takeaways

• Buterin’s proposal is not a call for a reckless rewrite, but a phased, multi-year strategy.

• The proposed reset is not just about technical architecture-it’s about preserving the values that made Ethereum a global force: openness, decentralization, and credible neutrality.