Ethereum founder recently sparked heated discussions in the community—he candidly raised a provocative question: Is the current development direction pushing Ethereum into the "protocol obesity" trap?

Specifically, his core concerns are threefold. First, no matter how powerful the node network and cryptographic protections are, if the protocol code becomes bloated and difficult to understand, it will undermine its trustless nature—users cannot verify what they trust, and it no longer truly represents decentralization. Second, the development process lacks a "garbage collection" mechanism; new features are continuously piled on, making the protocol increasingly heavy. Finally, he believes the upgrade pace should be slowed down, giving the protocol ample time to stabilize, allowing those redundant features to naturally phase out.

From another perspective, isn't this a wake-up call for the entire public chain track? Can richness of features and system simplicity truly coexist? Or have we already seen many L1 projects become difficult to maintain due to feature bloat?

The next step for the ETH ecosystem may depend on whether developers can find this balance—simplicity does not mean lack of functionality, but smarter trade-offs. What do you think of this viewpoint?