On Sunday, Vitalik Buterin urged developers on X to tackle Ethereum’s growing protocol bloat, stated. He said removing outdated features will protect trustlessness and long-term self-sovereignty.
Buterin warned that rising complexity harms verification, rebuildability, and user autonomy. “Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and it has 49% byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes fully verify everything with quantum-safe peerdas and starks, if the protocol is an unwieldy mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of PhD-level cryptography, ultimately that protocol fails,”
He blamed a backward-compatibility bias that favors additions over deletions. He urged adding a formal simplification or “garbage collection” function to prune features and reduce code size.
Buterin proposed limits on exotic cryptography and more fixed invariants to make client behavior predictable. He also suggested moving seldom-used capabilities out of the core protocol into smart contracts (Ed. note: the walkaway test asks whether others could rebuild clients if current teams disappear).
He pointed to past cleanups like the move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and recent gas-cost reforms. In contrast, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said networks must keep evolving, arguing continuous iteration prevents irrelevance.
