Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Calls for "Garbage Cleanup" to Save the Blockchain

Vitalik Buterin recently warned that the biggest risk facing Ethereum may no longer be competition, regulation, or scalability issues. The real threat is more insidious: complexity. He bluntly stated that as the protocol expands in size, becomes more technical, and increasingly difficult to understand, the trustlessness, sovereignty, and resilience that Ethereum has long pursued are quietly being eroded. He emphasized that blockchains do not become stronger by stacking functions; instead, they may become more fragile.

Ethereum is often praised for its decentralization features, with thousands of nodes jointly validating transactions and no single entity controlling the network. But Vitalik pointed out that decentralization alone is not enough. If the protocol becomes so complex that only a few experts can fully understand it, trust mechanisms will subtly revert—users will ultimately still need to rely on developers, auditors, or cryptography experts to explain how the system works and its security. At this point, the system may still have decentralization features in theory but have deviated from its original intent in practice. Vitalik calls this dilemma the "Withdrawal Test": if the current client teams disappear, can new developers truly rebuild the Ethereum client from scratch and achieve the same security and quality standards? As the codebase grows and cryptographic schemes become more obscure, the answer is becoming increasingly unclear.

Every new feature adds interaction paths between different modules of the protocol, and each interaction could become a potential breach point leading to system failure. Vitalik warned that Ethereum development tends to focus on adding features to solve specific problems, but rarely cleans up old parts. Backward compatibility makes it difficult to remove features, leading to a gradual accumulation of technical debt. Over time, this bloated state will make Ethereum harder to ensure security, conduct audits, and achieve secure evolution.

To address this, Buterin calls for a clear simplification process that not only optimizes the code but also actively removes redundancies. His simplification philosophy focuses on three points: reducing total code lines, decreasing reliance on highly complex cryptography, and strengthening core invariants (i.e., rules that the protocol can always depend on). Fewer variable components make the system easier to understand and harder to attack. Ethereum has precedent for such practices: transitioning from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake was a large-scale cleanup. Future reforms (such as more streamlined consensus designs or migrating complexity to smart contracts rather than the core protocol) can follow the same logic.

The most thought-provoking conclusion in Vitalik's discourse may be that Ethereum might need to reduce rather than increase change. He describes Ethereum's first fifteen years as an experimental growth period, testing many ideas, some successful, some failed. The current risk is that failed or outdated ideas are allowed to become permanent burdens. If Ethereum hopes to survive for decades or even a century, Vitalik suggests that it must prioritize simplicity over ambition. Otherwise, the protocol may become so overly complex that it ultimately cannot truly belong to its users. $ETH