Ethereum’s co-founder warns the network’s mounting complexity could doom its century-long survival and calls for a radical cleanup.
Vitalik Buterin has sounded the alarm on Ethereum’s growing complexity, arguing that relentless feature additions threaten the blockchain’s ability to last 100 years. In a string of social-media posts, he urged developers to swap the current upgrade culture for an explicit “garbage collection” process that prizes simplicity above all else.
At a Glance
- Buterin says Ethereum’s expanding codebase undercuts security, decentralization, and self-sovereignty
- He wants protocol upgrades judged by how much code they delete, not by how much they add
- Three concrete metrics proposed: single-page code limit, fewer crypto dependencies, stronger invariants
- Why it matters: If the network keeps bloating, users will depend on a shrinking circle of experts and the chain could fail within decades
The Bloat Problem
Buterin argues that “excessive bloat” erodes the very properties that make Ethereum valuable. A tangle of hundreds of thousands of lines and multiple cryptographic schemes, he wrote, fails the “walkaway test,” because ordinary users must trust specialists to explain how the protocol works.
Key risks he flagged:
- New teams would struggle to maintain the codebase if current developers walk away
- Every extra component raises the chance of unexpected interactions and bugs
- If even experts cannot audit the system, users cannot truly own it
“An important, and perennially underrated, aspect of ‘trustlessness’, ‘passing the walkaway test’ and ‘self-sovereignty’ is protocol simplicity,” he emphasized.
Feature Fever
The co-founder criticized developers who rush to bolt on niche capabilities. While these additions may deliver short-term convenience, he believes they chip away at long-term self-sovereignty and undermine the goal of a decentralized network that endures for a century.
Buterin traced the root issue to how upgrades are evaluated. Because backward compatibility is prized, each change is measured against the existing stack, creating an incentive to add rather than remove functions. Over time, this dynamic guarantees bloat.
Garbage-Collection Prescription
To reverse the trend, Buterin proposed treating protocol development like garbage collection. He laid out three benchmarks:
- Shrink the codebase until the critical rules fit on a single page
- Avoid unnecessary cryptographic dependencies; stick to a minimal, well-tested set
- Add invariants the chain can rely on, citing EIP-6780 limits on storage-slot changes and EIP-7825 caps on transaction-processing cost
He noted cleanup can happen incrementally-streamlining existing features-or through sweeping shifts such as the prior move from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.
Rosetta Compatibility
For pieces that are hard to delete yet rarely used, Buterin floated a “Rosetta-style backwards compatibility” approach. These modules would exit the core protocol and live on as opt-in smart contracts, keeping the base layer lean while preserving access for those who need legacy functions.
Long Game
The post closes with a plea to judge every proposal by the code it removes. If Ethereum continues to accumulate features without cleanup, Buterin warns, the network risks collapsing under its own weight long before it reaches its hundredth birthday.
