In a major update to the long-term roadmap of the protocol, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called for simplification of ETH’s basic protocol to make the network more efficient and resilient.
How does Ethereum achieve protocol simplicity?
In a May 3 blog post titled “Simplified L1,” Buterin shared his views on the need to simplify the Ethereum network, noting that simplicity is an important (but easy to underestimate), a view on scalability and resilience. The founders of Crypto continue to applaud the simplicity of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Butling said:
Even smart high school students can completely tangle their heads and understand the Bitcoin protocol. Programmers are able to write clients as hobby projects.
Source: vitalik.eth
According to Buterin, protocol simplicity offers various benefits that are good for ensuring that blockchain networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum remain a very neutral and fundamental layer of global trust. At the same time, it also reduces infrastructure costs, long-term maintenance costs, and the risk of bugs and malicious attacks.
In a blog post, Butling also describes how the Ethereum network has become as simple as Bitcoin in five years. According to the co-founder, one of the three ways to achieve this simplicity is through a more optimal consensus layer, most notably the 3-slot final redesign.
Furthermore, Buterin mentioned simplification of the execution layer and complained about how the complexity of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) increased unnecessarily. To solve this problem, the crypto co-founder proposed replacing the EVM with a new minimal virtual machine, such as RISC-V.
The co-founder noted:
The biggest challenge of meaningful simplification (even improving without complexity) is how any part of the EVM is balanced to achieve the desired goals and retain backward compatibility for existing applications.
Finally, Buterin outlines the third and “most underestimated” approach to enhancing protocol simplicity is to share a standard across different parts of the protocol. “It is usually very little benefit to do the same thing in different places using different protocols,” said Ethereum co-founder.
Buterin concluded that simplicity is very similar to decentralization, which is necessary in achieving resilience in blockchain.
Ethereum price overview
While Buterin will seek to adjust the Ethereum network, ETH investors will hope that these enhancements will translate into the value of Ethereum tokens. So far, ETH’s performance has been overwhelming in 2025, starting four months in the year.
As of this writing, the price of ether is about $1,817, reflecting a 1.6% drop in the past 24 hours. It is worth mentioning that Ethereum price has enjoyed some bullish momentum over the past two weeks, with its value growing by nearly 15% during that period.
The price of ETH on the daily timeframe | Source: ETHUSDT chart on TradingView
Featured images from Istock, charts for TradingView
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