Vitalik Buterin Lays Out a Radical Vision for Simplifying Ethereum

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published a detailed proposal advocating for a radical simplification of Ethereum's core protocol over the next five years.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published a detailed proposal advocating for a radical simplification of Ethereum’s core protocol over the next five years.

His vision, which is inspired by Bitcoin’s elegantly minimal design and is titled “The Goal of Simplifying the L1,” was shared in a recent post.

Aiming For Simplicity In Ethereum’s Architecture

Buterin notes that as Ethereum transforms into a global, scalable and resilient computer, it also needs protocol architecture that is easy to reason about, understand, and maintain.

He feels that Ethereum has become increasingly complex over the years due to the fact that most of the improvements have yielded diminishing returns on the effort of the creators.

Referring to Bitcoin’s elegant block structure and consensus algorithm, Buterin feels that Ethereum can be equally elegant.

“We can set a goal of having the entire PoS+block+tx+receipts+state structure and all the persistent data structures used in the light client be able to fit within a single A4 page, and the main programs (execution engine, PoS engine, network code) to be smaller than 60,000 lines of code.

If we can get the code small enough, it will become possible to get large portions of the protocol, or even the whole thing, into a state of being completely formally verified. This would be a huge step forward in terms of making the protocol more secure and reliable.”

With this in mind, Buterin thinks that there should be a line-of-code limit placed on the Ether protocol to keep its increasing complexity in check.

This, in turn, would keep Ethereum from becoming dependent on some small group of technocratic elites and allow greater opportunities for participation in development and governance.

RISC-V’s Potential To Revolutionize Ethereum’s Execution Layer

The central part of Buterin’s proposal involves envisioning a complete overhaul of Ether’s execution layer. He notes the increasing inefficiency of Ether’s EVM.

The environment, he claims, is over-engineered to function with outdated cryptography as well as specific edge cases. Instead of making piecemeal reforms, Buterin suggests replacing the EVM with a far simpler virtual machine such as RISC-V.

ETH researcher Barnabé Monnot, who has extensively contributed to VM performance and zero-knowledge proofs, is in favor of this direction.

He adds that executing smart contracts natively on a machine based on RISC-V may bring more than 100x in execution performance improvements and eliminate most of the legacy code Ethereum now has.

This will also simplify formal verification, minimal bugs, and support more mainstream programming languages better.

Simplifying Ethereum’s Infrastructure

Buterin also emphasizes unifying multiple backends like erasure codes, serialization schemes, and Merkle trees.

Currently, there are separate, often incompatible protocols that each component in Ether uses to do things that should be standardized.

By employing one serialization format such as SSZ and one erasure code across consensus, execution, and storage layers, Ethereum may be able to significantly cut back on duplication and resulting technical debt.

This under-the-radar route of simplifying by standardizing shared infrastructure may be Ether’s silent game-changer.

It is harmonious with the more aggressive proposals in the area of consensus and execution without impacting developers or users and may be the answer to keeping Ether both scalable and robust in the long term.