Simplifying the L1

Once upon a time, Bitcoin amazed us - a protocol that even high school students can understand can support the operation of the global decentralized financial system.

The goal of Ethereum is to become the world's ledger—a platform that carries civilization's assets and records, and supports the underlying protocol of key infrastructure such as finance, governance, and high-value data authentication. To achieve this vision, two core capabilities must be taken into account: scalability and resilience.

Among them, scalability is related to throughput, L2 technology, and the expansion of data space. The Fusaka hard fork will bring a 10-fold increase in L2 data space, and the 2026 roadmap also plans to make similar expansions to L1.

At the same time, Merge has switched Ethereum to PoS consensus, client diversity has rapidly improved, ZK verifiability and quantum attack resistance research have continued to advance, and the application layer has become more powerful.

However, in addition to expansion and performance, there is another easily overlooked but equally important foundation for resilience, which is the simplicity of the protocol.

The simplicity of Bitcoin

When talking about simplicity, it's impossible to avoid mentioning Bitcoin. The simplicity of Bitcoin's protocol is amazing:

The blockchain consists of a string of blocks;

Each block is linked to the previous block via a hash;

The block is verified by PoW, that is, checking whether the first few bits of its hash are 0;

Each block contains transactions, which consume coins generated by mining or previous transactions.

A high school student who knows code can fully understand how the Bitcoin protocol works, and a programmer can even implement a client on his own as a side project. This simplicity brings the following benefits:

It is easier to be widely understood, lowers the threshold for research and development, and prevents it from being dominated by "technocrats";

Reduce the cost of developing new clients, validators, tools, and other interface infrastructure;

Reduce the complexity of long-term maintenance;

Reduce the risk of major security vulnerabilities and make it easier to verify the correctness of the protocol;

Reduce the social attack surface that can be manipulated by special interests.

Together, these benefits are crucial for decentralization. If a protocol is understood and maintained by only a small number of people, or if it is difficult to use and modify, then it will be difficult to decentralize.

Why is Ethereum becoming more complex?

Compared with Bitcoin, Ethereum is undoubtedly more complex, with a more complex virtual machine, a different consensus mechanism, and layers of pre-compiled contracts, data structures, and gas mechanisms.

There are several reasons for this complexity:

1. Historical burden: Ethereum started with a simpler design, but as it developed, it encountered various problems and patched them up one by one, leading to the accumulation of complexity. For example, the early version of Ethereum did not have a clear L1/L2 division, and later encountered scalability problems, so it began to develop L2 technology.

2. Pursuit of performance and functionality: In order to improve performance and introduce new functionality, such as ZK proofs and quantum resistance, the protocol design needs to be adjusted, which will inevitably increase complexity.

3. Emphasis on programmability: Ethereum aims to be a programmable blockchain, providing a virtual machine and smart contract system for developers to build applications. This programmability requires more complex protocol designs to support.

However, although there are客观上存在的一些原因, we should not ignore the subjective factors that led to this outcome. In the past few years, there has been a lack of urgency and initiative to simplify Ethereum, which has led to the accumulation of technical debt and a decline in maintainability.

The importance of simplicity

In the long run, the simplicity of the protocol is more conducive to decentralization, security, and upgradeability.

A simple protocol is easier to understand and analyze, which can help more people participate in auditing and security research. A complex protocol is more likely to contain undiscovered vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by attackers.

Moreover, a simple protocol is easier to maintain and upgrade. If the protocol is too complex, it will be difficult to modify and adjust it when encountering new problems or opportunities.

Finally, a simple protocol is less likely to be subject to social manipulation. If a protocol is only understood and controlled by a small group of people, it will be easier for them to exert influence and make decisions according to their own interests.

How to simplify Ethereum

In the next five years, Ethereum has the potential to become almost as simple as Bitcoin, and we can start from two levels: the consensus layer and the execution layer.

1. Simplify the consensus layer

The new consensus mechanism of the future (formerly known as the beam chain) combines the deep accumulation of consensus theory, ZK-SNARK, staking economics, etc. in the past decade. Its goal is to build a long-term optimal and significantly simplified consensus layer. Key initiatives include:

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