Ethereum's Complexity Challenge: Vitalik's Vision for Sustainable Protocol Development

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Ethereum’s complexity problem

Vitalik Buterin has been thinking about something that’s been bothering him for a while. The Ethereum co-founder posted a lengthy thread on X this week, and it’s all about what he sees as a growing threat to the network’s long-term health. He’s worried that Ethereum is getting too complicated.

It’s not just about adding new features or making things more efficient. Buterin’s concern goes deeper. He believes that if the protocol becomes too dense, too filled with what he calls “PhD-level cryptographies,” then regular people won’t be able to verify what’s happening on the network. And that, in his view, undermines the whole point of decentralization.

The walkaway test

Buterin brought up this concept he calls the “walkaway test.” It’s a simple idea, really. Could Ethereum continue to operate securely if he and all the other original founders and core researchers just… left? Permanently? If new teams couldn’t pick up the project without needing expert guidance from the original developers, then the test fails.

Right now, Buterin thinks Ethereum might be failing that test. He sees developers constantly adding new features to solve specific problems, which creates what he describes as technical debt. Over time, this debt becomes “highly destructive” to the network’s future.

“One of my fears with Ethereum protocol development is that we can be too eager to add new features to meet highly specific needs,” he wrote. “Even if those features bloat the protocol or add entire new types of interacting components or complicated cryptography as critical dependencies.”

Code garbage collection

So what’s the solution? Buterin is calling for something he terms “garbage collection” in the development process. It’s not about throwing everything out, but rather being intentional about removing obsolete code and dependencies that no longer serve a clear purpose.

He suggests this can happen in two ways. There’s the piecemeal approach—taking existing features and streamlining them so they’re simpler and make more sense. Then there’s the larger-scale approach, which might involve more significant restructuring.

Buterin pointed to Ethereum’s transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake as an example of this philosophy working. He framed it not just as an upgrade, but as a necessary purge of legacy mechanisms that had become inefficient.

Looking ahead

This thinking suggests a potential shift in how Ethereum develops moving forward. Buterin seems to be advocating for a slower rate of change, with more focus on auditability and simplicity rather than constant feature additions.

“In the long term, I hope that the rate of change to Ethereum can be slower,” he stated. “I think for various reasons that ultimately that must happen. These first fifteen years should in part be viewed as an adolescence stage where we explored a lot of ideas and saw what works and what is useful and what is not.”

He outlined three concrete metrics for measuring progress: minimizing total protocol code, reducing reliance on complex components, and increasing the number of self-sufficient invariants.

It’s interesting timing. As Ethereum matures, there’s this tension between innovation and stability. Buterin’s comments suggest he’s leaning more toward the stability side now, prioritizing a network that regular people can actually understand and verify over one with every possible feature.

Perhaps this is just the natural evolution of a platform that’s moving from experimental technology to something more foundational. The question is whether the broader Ethereum community will follow this direction, or if there will be pushback from developers who want to keep building new things.