Vitalik Buterin Argues That Ethereum Needs a Complete Overhaul: 'It Has Become Too Complex'.

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, asserts that Ethereum’s long-term goals of trustlessness and sovereignty are directly related to the simplicity of the protocol.
Buterin states that the increasing complexity of the protocol over time has undermined its security and resilience, and that Ethereum’s development requires a clear “simplification” and “refactoring” mechanism.
According to Buterin, a protocol, no matter how decentralized, will fail three basic tests if it has hundreds of thousands of lines of code, countless complex cryptographic dependencies, and a structure only a small group of experts can understand. These are: it cannot truly be trustless, new development teams cannot maintain the system if current teams disappear, and users cannot fully control the protocol like “their own system.” He also believes that this complexity increases security vulnerabilities due to interactions between protocol components.
Buterin argues that rushing to add new features for short-term benefits during development can be detrimental in the long run, contending that this approach conflicts with the goal of building a sustainable decentralized infrastructure over a century. He states that the desire to maintain backward compatibility encourages additions but makes removal more difficult, inevitably leading to a “bloated” protocol.
To address this, he defines “simplification” with three main criteria: minimizing the total number of lines of code in the protocol, avoiding unnecessary complex technical dependencies, and adding more “immutables” that the protocol can rely on. For example, he recalls that some Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) have significantly simplified the development and scaling of clients.
Buterin believes that simplification can be done gradually or on a large scale. Previously, he described the transition from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS) as a major “refactoring” effort, and he suggests that similar comprehensive cleanups could be carried out in the future through initiatives like “consensus refinement.” He also points out that some complex but underutilized features could be moved from mandatory protocol components to smart contracts, reducing this burden for new client developers.
Buterin argues that Ethereum’s pace of change should slow down in the long term, describing the first 15 years as a “trial and exploration phase.” He believes that elements that prove inefficient or offer limited benefits should not become a permanent burden on the protocol, and he contends that Ethereum’s future depends on evolving into a simpler, more understandable, and more sustainable structure.