Ethereum Goes Minimalist — Vitalik Buterin Wants to Make ETH As Simple As Bitcoin

🧠 Ethereum Wants to Be Understandable — Even to Your Dad

Vitalik Buterin is done with protocol bloat.

His new vision for Ethereum?
A lean, minimal, and auditable blockchain — as simple as Bitcoin, but still powerful enough to run the decentralized internet.

“Simplicity is resilience,” Buterin writes.
“It’s time to clean house — radically.”

🔁 Why Ethereum Needs a Simplicity Revolution

Ethereum today:

• 🧱 Beacon Chain, sync committees, epochs, opcodes, precompiles...
• 🧠 Complex enough to make seasoned devs sweat
• 🔧 Hard to audit, harder to maintain

Vitalik’s argument: a simpler Ethereum = more secure, more dev-friendly, more future-proof.

⏱ 3-Slot Finality: Ethereum’s New Brain

Forget epochs and validator shuffles.
The new plan? Three. Simple. Slots.

• 🧼 Removes Beacon-era clutter (epochs, sync committees)
• 📏 Shrinks consensus logic to ~200 lines of code
• ⚡ Supports STARK-based proof aggregation
• 🧠 Makes fork choice and validation crystal clear

It’s Ethereum’s new brain — one that can actually fit in yours.

🛠 Kill the EVM? Vitalik Says Yes — Eventually

The EVM is clunky, outdated, and slowing Ethereum’s zero-knowledge future.

Vitalik’s plan:

• 🚀 Swap it out for something like RISC-V or Cairo
• 🧩 100x faster ZK prover compatibility
• ✂️ Native support for modern tooling
• 🧼 Cleaner specs, no legacy junk

But no panic: the EVM lives on — inside a RISC-V smart contract.
Think of it as a dusty museum wing… that still works.

🔗 One Stack to Rule Them All

Ethereum’s fragmentation problem?
Vitalik wants it gone.

Proposals to unify the layers:

• 🔁 One erasure code for data availability, P2P, storage
• 🧬 One serialization format (SSZ across the stack)
• 🌳 One data tree — ditch hexary for binary Merkle everywhere

The result: fewer bugs, faster zero-knowledge proofs, more coherent dev tooling.

📏 Simplicity as a Cultural Shift

Ethereum's pivot is philosophical, not just technical.

Vitalik’s simplicity doctrine:

• 🔒 Set a maximum line count for consensus logic
• 🧠 Push complexity to layer 2s, clients, and tools
• 💥 Focus on readability over cleverness
• 📉 Stop over-optimizing — optimize for resilience

It’s Ethereum, not as the “everything computer” — but as the lean OS powering it all.

🧠 TL;DR: Ethereum’s Complexity Era Is Ending — And That’s a Good Thing

• 🧱 3-slot finality simplifies consensus to 200 lines
• 🛠 A new VM (RISC-V?) may replace the aging EVM
• 🌐 Unified stack with shared trees, codecs, and logic
• 🧘 Simplicity = security, auditability, and adoption
• 🛡 Ethereum becomes elegant, not just powerful

The next Ethereum won’t just scale.
It’ll make sense.