Ethereum's goal is to become the world ledger - a platform carrying and recording civilizational assets, supporting key infrastructure protocols for finance, governance, and high-value data certification. To realize this vision, two core capabilities must be balanced: scalability and resilience.
Fusaka hard fork will bring a 10-fold improvement to the L2 data space, and the 2026 roadmap also plans similar expansion for L1. Meanwhile, Merge has transitioned Ethereum to PoS consensus, client diversity has rapidly improved, research on ZK verifiability and quantum attack resistance continues to advance, and the application layer is becoming increasingly powerful. But beyond capacity and performance, there is another easily overlooked yet equally important foundation of resilience: protocol simplicity.
Simplicity is the Ultimate Shield of Decentralization
What makes Bitcoin most admirable is the extreme simplicity of its protocol:
- The blockchain consists of a series of blocks;
- Each block is linked to the previous block via hash;
- Blocks are verified through PoW, i.e., checking if the first few hash digits are 0;
- Each block contains transactions that consume coins generated by mining or previous transactions.
A high school student who understands coding can completely comprehend Bitcoin's protocol operation, and a programmer can even implement a client as a hobby project. This simplicity brings the following benefits:
- Easier to be widely understood, lowering research and development thresholds, preventing domination by "technical bureaucrats";
- Reducing the cost of developing new clients, validators, tools, and other interface infrastructures;
- Decreasing long-term maintenance complexity;
- Lowering the risk of major security vulnerabilities and making protocol correctness easier to verify;
- Reducing the social attack surface manipulated by special interests.
Historically, Ethereum has not done well in this aspect, leading to unnecessary development costs, security risks, and a closed research culture. In the next five years, Ethereum has the potential to become almost as simple as Bitcoin, which we can approach from two levels: consensus and execution layers.
Simplifying the Consensus Layer
The future new consensus mechanism (previously called beam chain) integrates deep accumulation from the past decade in consensus theory, ZK-SNARK, and staking economics, with the goal of building a long-term optimal and significantly simplified consensus layer. Key measures include:
- Three-slot finality mechanism: Remove complex slot and epoch logic; no longer need committee shuffle or sync committee; can be written in approximately 200 lines of code; closer to optimal security compared to the current Gasper protocol.
- Simplified fork choice and network structure: Fewer active validators allow simpler fork selection rules; STARK aggregation enables anyone to become an aggregator without trust and complex payments; more robust p2p architecture.
- Simplified state transition logic: Redesign mechanisms for validator joining, exiting, withdrawal, and key switching; reduce code complexity and more clearly express key subjective cycle behaviors.
The advantage of the consensus layer is its relative independence from EVM execution, allowing more freedom for these upgrades. The real challenge lies in simplifying the execution layer.
Simplifying the Execution Layer
The execution layer is the true "black magic gathering place": complex EVM instruction set, verbose and hard-to-understand precompiled contracts, non-extensible SELFDESTRUCT, and excessive historical compatibility burden. Therefore, replacing EVM with a concise, high-performance, ZK-native friendly VM like RISC-V offers advantages such as:
- Direct performance improvement of 100 times;
- Seamless integration with mainstream programming languages;
- Native operation in zero-knowledge proof systems;
- Clear static structure, conducive to auditing and security verification;
- Almost no precompiled contracts needed, allowing even quantum-resistant algorithms to be natively deployed in the future.
The migration is not a hard fork, but allows old contracts to continue running in an EVM interpreter, which itself is a contract written in RISC-V. Just as Apple used Rosetta to transition to ARM chips, Ethereum can upgrade its virtual machine painlessly.
Shared Components to Build a More Elegant System Foundation
Future Ethereum protocols should integrate more "shared components" to fundamentally reduce system complexity:
- Unified erasure coding: For data availability sampling, historical storage, and P2P broadcast acceleration, avoiding repeated design;
- Unified serialization format (SSZ): Similar to current ABI, compatible but more efficient, facilitating L2 decoupling;
- Unified state tree structure (binary tree): More suitable for ZK proofs, faster, and simpler.
This means Ethereum's underlying structure will no longer be composed of "various patched compromises" but truly built as "protocol building blocks" with engineering aesthetics.
When Complexity Reaches Its Limit, It's the Best Time to Start Simplifying
Simplicity is similar to decentralization in many aspects, both being upstream values leading to system resilience. Truly valuing simplicity requires a cultural shift, with benefits often difficult to immediately quantify, while the cost of abandoning flashy features and extra effort is immediately apparent. However, the value of simplicity will gradually emerge over time, with Bitcoin being the best example.
Borrowing from tinygrad's approach, setting a maximum line count goal for Ethereum's long-term specification aims to make the consensus critical path complexity as close as possible to Bitcoin's simplicity. Historical rule-related logic will still be retained but isolated outside the consensus path. At the same time, the overall design should adhere to the principle of "prioritizing simpler solutions", favoring local encapsulation over systemic complexity, and preferring architectural choices with clear attributes and verifiability.
