Vitalik Buterin calls for Ethereum to adopt Bitcoin-style simplicity over next five years

Vitalik Buterin said Ethereum needs to quit pretending it’s fine. On Friday, he published a long proposal calling for Ethereum to cut out its over-complicated guts and move closer to the clean structure of Bitcoin within five years.

“Ethereum wants to be the world’s ledger,” Vitalik wrote, pointing to its role as a base layer for crypto, finance, governance, authentication, and records. But to actually get there, he said the chain has to be both scalable and resilient — and right now, it’s too complex to handle that.

The Fusaka hard fork is supposed to increase L2 data space by 10x. Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap promises to boost L1 data capacity to match. The network already switched to proof of stake, improved client diversity, and is working on ZK verifiability and quantum resistance.

But Vitalik said none of that matters if the core protocol stays bloated. “We need to shine a light on the importance of simplicity,” he wrote. He pointed to Bitcoin’s design — blocks, hashes, proof of work, and nothing more — as the model Ethereum should follow.

Vitalik pushes for a simpler Ethereum consensus layer

Vitalik said Ethereum can get there by rewriting its consensus layer. He wants to replace the current beacon chain with something called 3-slot finality, which would remove slots, epochs, committee shuffling, and other moving parts.

“You could build this in 200 lines of code,” he wrote . He said it offers strong security and removes a lot of bloat from the system. The smaller validator sets also make the fork choice rule simpler.

He said Ethereum should use STARK-based aggregation so anyone can be an aggregator without needing special trust or overpaying for bitfields. The cryptography is complicated, but it’s boxed in and doesn’t screw with the whole system. That opens the door to a simpler peer-to-peer layer.

Validator functions — like entry, exit, withdrawal, key changes, and inactivity leaks — should be rebuilt to reduce the line count and make system guarantees easier to read. Vitalik said the best part about consensus is it’s not tightly connected to the execution layer, so it can evolve without breaking contracts.

But the real mess, he said, is the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Vitalik wants to kill the EVM and move to RISC-V

Vitalik said the EVM is stuffed with outdated crap. He called it an over-engineered 256-bit machine optimized for crypto tricks that nobody uses anymore. He admitted most of the complexity came from his own choices.

The fight to remove the SELFDESTRUCT opcode was a waste of time. So was the whole EOF debate. His solution: skip the small upgrades and just replace the EVM.

He proposed switching to RISC-V or another VM like Cairo — the same ones being used by Ethereum’s zero-knowledge proof systems. “Succinct data shows this could boost efficiency by 100x,” he said. Simpler specs would mean faster execution and fewer bugs. 

Developers would get more options. Solidity and Vyper would compile to new VMs, and devs using normal programming languages could write Ethereum contracts for the first time. Most precompiles could be scrapped, except maybe for elliptic curve ops.

Vitalik admitted that RISC-V won’t be ready tomorrow. While waiting, he wants to pass quick upgrades to the current EVM, such as raising contract size limits and adding new DUP/SWAP opcodes. But the real goal is to replace the entire thing. His plan comes in four steps.

First, every new precompile must come with an onchain RISC-V version. Second, developers should be allowed to write contracts in both RISC-V and EVM. Third, Ethereum would do a hard fork to remove precompiles and replace them with RISC-V contracts. Fourth, the EVM would get re-implemented inside RISC-V and run onchain as a contract interpreter.

Vitalik said Ethereum also wastes time using different tools for the same job in different places. He pointed to erasure codes, which are needed for data availability, P2P broadcasts, and history storage. All three should use the same code. The same goes for serialization formats — Ethereum should move fully to SSZ, which is already in use in the consensus layer and works inside smart contracts.

He said Ethereum’s Merkle tree also sucks. The current hexary structure makes block proving hard. Switching to a binary tree with a better hash would make proving faster and cheaper. That same binary tree should be used for both execution and consensus.

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