In recent posts on social media, Vitalik Buterin warned that rising complexity threatens Ethereum‘s ability to last a century, as stated. He said the network risks losing security, decentralization, and true trustlessness.
“An important, and perennially underrated, aspect of ‘trustlessness’, ‘passing the walkaway test’ and ‘self-sovereignty’ is protocol simplicity,” he wrote. The quote framed his view that unwieldy code forces users to rely on a few experts.
Buterin argued that hundreds of thousands of lines of code and diverse cryptography make inspection and maintenance impractical. New teams would struggle to match current quality if core maintainers stopped working.
He warned that each added component raises the chance of failures, especially when parts interact in complex ways. He also discouraged feature additions that solve short-term needs but harm long-term self-sovereignty.
As a remedy, he proposed treating upgrades as ongoing “garbage collection” to remove clutter. He suggested metrics like reducing code to a page, avoiding unnecessary cryptographic dependencies, and adding invariants such as EIP-6780 limits on storage slot changes and EIP-7825’s maximum transaction processing cost.
Buterin said simplification can proceed in small steps or through major shifts, similar to the Proof of Stake transition. He also proposed a Rosetta-style backward compatibility, moving rare and difficult features out of the core protocol into smart contracts.
