Vitalik Buterin’s Radical Pitch: Strip Ethereum Down to Bitcoin’s Bare-Bones Simplicity

Ethereum’s co-founder drops a bombshell proposal—what if the world’s smart contract platform ditched complexity to mimic Bitcoin’s minimalist design?

The ’Less is More’ Blockchain Gambit

Buterin’s vision cuts against a decade of Ethereum’s feature creep—layer 2s, rollups, and endless upgrades. Now he’s floating a back-to-basics approach that would make crypto purists cheer (and devs shudder).

Wall Street Won’t Like This

Simpler code means fewer attack vectors—but also fewer ’enterprise solutions’ for banks to overcharge for. The irony? A leaner Ethereum might actually achieve the institutional adoption its bloated version keeps promising.

One thing’s certain: in crypto, even the founders get tired of their own creations. Next week—Buterin proposes replacing smart contracts with carrier pigeons.

Simplifying Ethereum

Key benefits of simplifying Ethereum include making the protocol easier to understand, increasing participation in development, and reducing the costs of creating new infrastructure and tools.

It also lowers long-term maintenance requirements, minimizes the risk of catastrophic bugs, and reduces the potential for social attacks and special interests.

There are three major areas of simplification: Consensus Layer, Execution Layer, and sharing components across protocol layers, he said.

“The effort to revamp Ethereum’s consensus includes many opportunities to simplify consensus, while also increasing efficiency and security.”

Simplification could include implementing a ‘three-slot finality’ design to remove complex concepts like slots and epochs, reducing active validators to enable simpler fork choice rules, and using STARK-based aggregation to eliminate trust concerns.

“The EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] is increasingly growing in complexity, and much of that complexity has proven unnecessary,” Buterin said regarding the Execution Layer.

He suggested replacing the complex EVM with RISC-V, an open standard instruction set architecture, or another simpler virtual machine. This could provide 100x performance improvements, much simpler specifications, better developer options, and increased code size limits.

“The third and most easily underrated way to reduce total protocol complexity is to share one standard across different parts of the stack as much as possible,” he said, before adding, “There should ideally only be one way we do [something], across the consensus, execution, and other layers.”

Buterin concluded that simplifying the protocol would be worthwhile in the long run.

“Caring about simplicity is, like decentralization, a short-term cost for the sake of benefits that do not appear immediately.”

ETH Price Outlook

Ethereum has fallen out of favor among crypto investors this year, with its market share collapsing to an all-time low of 7% in April.

Spot prices have been hovering just above $1,800 so far this month, but dipped below it in early trading in Asia on Monday morning.

The asset remains at bear market levels, down 63% from its 2021 all-time high, whereas Bitcoin is 13% down from its peak price earlier this year.

Nevertheless, analysts remain confident that ETH can recover this year with a new roadmap and approaching upgrades.