Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has recently elaborated on the “The Purge” roadmap. He stated that protocols on Ethereum should remain “simple” to allow more people to verify the “entire protocol.”
(Background: Ethereum core developer Péter Szilágyi angrily criticizes: ETH Foundation’s unfair compensation and centralized power around Vitalik Buterin…)
(Additional context: Vitalik Buterin’s long article: What is a cyber nation? And my views on building a cyber nation)
Ethereum’s leader Vitalik Buterin earlier posted directly stating that “over-complexity” is the enemy of decentralization. If only a few experts can verify the code, trustlessness will break down.
He said:
An important but often underestimated form of “trustlessness” is increasing the number of people who can truly understand the entire protocol from start to finish.
Ethereum needs to do better in this regard, and the way is to make the protocol itself simpler.
“L1 Simplification Campaign” is still ongoing: trimming to survive
Vitalik pointed out that the protocol has become a black box. If only a very few understand updates, others can only “trust people, not the chain,” which completely deviates from the original trustless purpose.
These roadmap solutions are part of Vitalik’s plan for Ethereum’s “big cleanup (The Purge)” between 2025-2027. The core focus is on removal—making L1 simple and solidified, cutting historical states and redundant instructions, enabling synchronization and verification without massive hardware requirements.
All high-frequency and scalability needs will be shifted to Layer 2. Combined with ZK-friendly design and PeerDAS, lightweight nodes can achieve second-level verification, giving everyone back the power to verify on-chain. All these ideas come from Vitalik’s article written this year, “Simplifying the Layer1.” As for how simple the protocol code needs to be for everyone to understand from start to finish—perhaps in an AI-driven era, this won’t be very difficult.
For institutional funds, simplicity means “risk is calculable.” No wonder Vitalik said, “Transparency and protocol simplification are necessary to attract mainstream adoption.” With successful slimming down, Ethereum is poised to become the global settlement layer.
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