Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is calling on developers to fight against protocol bloat caused by the endless push to add new features while rarely removing old ones.
In Sunday’s post on X, Buterin argued that true credibility and self-sovereignty depend on simplicity rather than raw decentralization metrics.
“Even if a protocol is hyper-decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes, has 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, and the nodes have fully verified everything with quantum-secure Piada and Stark, if that protocol is an unruly mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of PhD-level encryption, eventually that protocol will fail,” he argued.
According to Buterin, this complexity weakens Ethereum (ETH) in three ways. First, it weakens credibility by forcing users to rely on a “high priest” to explain what the protocol actually does. Second, if the existing team disappears, it becomes unrealistic to rebuild high-quality clients, thus failing the so-called walk-away test. Third, self-sovereignty is eroded because even highly skilled users are no longer able to inspect or reason about the system themselves.
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Buterin urges ‘garbage collection’
Buterin warned that the root of the problem lies in how protocol changes are evaluated. When upgrades are judged primarily by how disruptive they are to existing systems, backward compatibility tends to dominate the decision-making. The result is a bias towards addition rather than subtraction, making the protocol heavier over time.
To counter this, he called for explicit “simplification” or “garbage collection” features in Ethereum’s development process. The goal is to reduce the total number of lines of code, limit dependence on complex cryptographic primitives, and introduce more invariants (fixed rules that make client behavior easier to predict and implement).
Ethereum masterminds pointed to past changes as an example of effective cleanup. While the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) was one major reset, recent initiatives such as gas price reform aim to replace arbitrary rules with clearer relationships to actual resource usage. Future cleanup may include demoting rarely used functionality from the core protocol to smart contracts, reducing the burden on client developers.
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Solana Labs CEO prefers a different approach
Meanwhile, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said Solana (SOL) must keep moving, arguing that any blockchain that stops evolving to meet the needs of developers and users risks becoming worthless. In response to Buterin’s recent post, Yakovenko argued that continued iteration is essential to Solana’s survival, even if no single group is responsible for driving change.
In contrast, Buterin argued that Ethereum will eventually need to pass a “walk-away test” and reach a point where it can operate securely and predictably for decades without ongoing developer intervention.
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