The Plan to Make Ethereum as Simple as Bitcoin in Five Years

In a blog post titled “Simplifying the L1”, published on May 3, Buterin shared a vision to restructure Ethereum’s architecture, focusing on its consensus, execution, and shared components.

“Buterin tackled the question of how Ethereum can become as simple as Bitcoin within five years, underlining that simplicity is key to the network’s resilience and long-term scalability.”

He noted that while recent upgrades—such as proof-of-stake (PoS) and zk-SNARK integrations—have made Ethereum stronger, the growing technical complexity has also caused bloated development cycles, rising costs, and increased risk of bugs:

“In the past, Ethereum often failed to follow this principle (sometimes due to my own decisions), leading to excessive development spending, all sorts of security risks, and a more isolated R&D culture, often chasing benefits that ultimately proved illusory.”

Simplifying Ethereum’s Consensus Layer: The “3-Slot Finality” Proposal

One of the core areas Buterin focused on is Ethereum’s consensus layer. The proposed “3-slot finality” model aims to eliminate complex components like epochs, sync committees, and validator shuffling.

“Buterin wrote that a smaller number of active validators at any given time makes it safer to implement simpler versions of the fork choice rule.”

Other suggested improvements include allowing for simpler fork choice rules and adopting STARK-based aggregation protocols to improve decentralization and streamline coordination.

A Faster and ZK-Friendly Virtual Machine: RISC-V

On the execution layer, Buterin proposed moving from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to a simpler, ZK-friendly virtual machine, such as RISC-V. This transition could bring up to 100x performance gains for zero-knowledge proofs while greatly simplifying the protocol.

RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture used in designing processors. It embraces a minimalist design approach, using a small set of simple commands to maximize efficiency and ease of implementation.

To ensure backward compatibility, Buterin proposed running legacy EVM contracts on-chain via a RISC-V interpreter, allowing both virtual machines to function in parallel during a transition phase.

A Push for Protocol-Wide Standardization

Buterin also emphasized the need for protocol-wide standardization. To reduce unnecessary complexity and enhance Ethereum’s tooling and infrastructure, he proposed adopting a single erasure coding method, a standard serialization format (preferably SSZ), and a unified tree structure.

“Simplicity is in many ways similar to decentralization,” Buterin stated. He recommended that Ethereum adopt a “maximum line-of-code” target, as seen in the Tinygrad project, to keep consensus-critical logic as minimal and auditable as possible.

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