Vitalik proposed a minimalist Ethereum development blueprint to reduce technical debt and drop the development threshold.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently published a technical article, proposing "simplicity" as the core approach for the future scalability and resilience of Blockchain. He further suggested that the Ethereum Mainnet should gradually transition from the current Virtual Machine EVM to a more efficient and easily verifiable new architecture, such as RISC-V, and may even adopt Cairo in the coming years to achieve comprehensive protocol simplification.

Vitalik drew inspiration from the simplicity of Bitcoin.

Vitalik Buterin pointed out that Ethereum has made significant achievements in scalability and application flexibility in the past, such as the Fusaka hard fork which will greatly enhance L2 data space, the completion of the Merge which shifted the public chain to Proof of Stake (PoS), and the ongoing advancement of zero-knowledge verifiability and quantum resistance mechanisms. However, to truly become the global trust layer for finance and data, "protocol simplicity" will be an underestimated yet indispensable key.

Vitalik Buterin stated that the success of Bitcoin largely comes from its simplicity: a single chain, a series of blocks, with each block verified through a straightforward proof-of-work mechanism that almost any developer can understand or even reimplement. In contrast, Ethereum's use of a more complex Virtual Machine, numerous precompiled functions, and historical baggage raises the barrier for new client development, reduces the number of protocol participants, and can even lead to excessive centralization of governance.

What are the benefits of making Ethereum simpler?

Allow more people to understand and participate in the research, development, and governance of the protocol, reducing the elite monopoly caused by technological barriers.

Reduce development and integration costs, such as new clients, new ZK provers, and new developer tools.

Reduce long-term maintenance costs.

Reduce systemic vulnerability risks, making bugs easier to detect and fix.

Reduce the attack surface of the society: The fewer the components, the less likely they are to be controlled by special interests.

He admitted that the overly complex protocol architecture of Ethereum partly stems from his design decisions and called for simplicity to be prioritized in the future, making the protocol not only easy to understand, participate in, and verify, but also enhancing security and development efficiency.

Simplified blueprint from consensus layer to execution layer

Vitalik Buterin described several significant simplification proposals that can be implemented in Ethereum over the next five years, covering the consensus layer and execution layer. During last year's Devcon in Bangkok, the solution of Beam Chain was proposed. Beam Chain attempts to integrate the experiences of the past decade in consensus theory, ZK-SNARK, staking economics, etc., to create a more long-term and optimized consensus layer. However, the new consensus layer is simpler than the current Beacon Chain (.

)Ethereum's most ambitious project, a quick overview of what Beam Chain mentioned by Justin Drake at Devcon in Bangkok is? (

Consensus Layer Simplification:

Using 3-slot finality )3-slot finality(, the distinction between slots and epochs, committee shuffling mechanism, synchronization committee, and other mechanisms have been eliminated. The basic implementation requires only about 200 lines of code, and the security is almost the best solution.

Using STARK aggregation proofs, allowing anyone to act as an aggregator without the need for a trusted central role.

Reconstruct the validator mechanism, including entry, exit, withdrawal, and inactive penalties, to simplify program logic and guarantee rules.

Execution Layer )Execution Layer( The refactoring focuses on abandoning the current EVM and transitioning to the RISC-V Virtual Machine or other ZK-friendly VMs, achieving more than 100 times the performance improvement. Vitalik stated that this can achieve fundamental efficiency improvements, as smart contracts can be executed directly within the provers )provers(, saving interpreter overhead. Compared to EVM, RISC-V is very simple. It also provides developers with more options, allowing Solidity and Vyper to add backends to compile for the new Virtual Machine.

He stated that if RISC-V is chosen, then developers writing in more mainstream languages will be able to port their code to the VM. This also eliminates the need for most precompiled code, retaining only a few high-performance requirements like elliptic curves ), which may also be removed after the emergence of quantum computers.

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Vitalik encourages Ethereum to set a code line limit to practice minimalism.

At the end of the article, Vitalik Buterin calls on the Ethereum community to regard "conciseness" as a spirit, just like decentralization, as the source of protocol resilience. He suggests that Ethereum can learn from the AI project tinygrad in the future by establishing a clear "maximum line count limit" to encourage subtractive design of protocol logic and to avoid mixing non-consensus necessary historical logic into the main process.

In this article, Vitalik proposes a minimalist Ethereum development blueprint to reduce technical debt and lower the development threshold, first appearing in Chain News ABMedia.