Vitalik’s Vision: How Ethereum Can Achieve Bitcoin-Level Protocol Simplicity

Ethereum aspires to be the world’s ledger—a foundational layer for storing digital assets, enabling decentralized finance, governance, and high-value data verification. To fulfill this role, it must be both scalable and resilient. While scalability efforts like the Fusaka hard fork aim to expand Layer 2 (L2) data availability tenfold, and future roadmaps target major Layer 1 (L1) upgrades by 2026, resilience remains equally critical.

Among the many dimensions of resilience, one is often overlooked: protocol simplicity. This article explores how Ethereum can evolve toward a leaner, more elegant architecture—inspired by Bitcoin’s minimalist design—while maintaining its advanced functionality.

Why Simplicity Matters

Bitcoin’s enduring strength lies in its protocol elegance. At its core:

• A blockchain is a chain of blocks, each cryptographically linked via hash.
• Validity is enforced through proof-of-work: hashes must meet difficulty targets.
• Transactions spend outputs either from mining rewards or prior transactions.

This logic is so straightforward that a bright high school student could grasp it—and a programmer might build a basic client as a weekend project.

Such simplicity delivers profound advantages:

• Easier analysis and auditing, inviting broader participation in development and governance.
• Lower integration costs for clients, provers, explorers, and tooling.
• Reduced maintenance overhead and long-term operational risk.
• Fewer attack vectors, both technical and social.
• Stronger neutrality, minimizing influence from special interests.

In contrast, Ethereum has historically prioritized short-term gains over long-term elegance. The result? Higher development costs, recurring security issues, and a more closed ecosystem. But that can change.

👉 Discover how next-gen blockchain architectures are redefining efficiency and trust.

Simplifying the Consensus Layer

The current Beacon Chain consensus mechanism—Gasper—is powerful but complex. A new proposal, sometimes referred to as "Beam Chain," aims to distill a decade of research in consensus theory, zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-SNARKs), and staking economics into a leaner, more secure foundation.

Key Improvements

• 3-Slot Finality: Eliminates the distinction between slots and epochs, removes committee rotations and sync committees. Security is near-optimal with just ~200 lines of core code.
• Bounded Validator Set: Limits active validators, enabling simpler fork choice rules without compromising safety.
• STARK-Based Aggregation: Allows any node to aggregate attestations, removing trust assumptions and redundant bitfields.
• Simplified P2P Networking: Streamlined validator dynamics enable more efficient peer-to-peer communication.
• Unified Validator Lifecycle: Redesigns onboarding, exits, withdrawals, key changes, and inactivity penalties with clearer parameters like weak subjectivity periods.
• Decoupling from Execution: Keeps consensus independent from EVM execution, allowing parallel innovation.

This isn’t just optimization—it’s architectural refinement. The goal isn’t incremental improvement but structural elegance.

Rethinking the Execution Layer

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) has grown increasingly complex. Many features—like 256-bit word sizes optimized for obsolete cryptographic primitives or niche precompiles with minimal usage—are now technical debt.

Piecemeal fixes like removing SELFDESTRUCT yield limited gains. Even recent debates around EOF (EVM Object Format) reveal how hard incremental changes have become.

A Bolder Approach: Replace the EVM

Instead of tweaking the EVM for a 1.5x performance gain, why not replace it entirely—with a new VM offering 100x improvements?

Similar to The Merge, this strategy reduces the number of disruptive upgrades while increasing their strategic impact.

Why RISC-V or ZK-Friendly VMs?

Proposed replacements include RISC-V or VMs used in ZK systems like Cairo. Benefits include:

• Massive Efficiency Gains: In ZK environments, contracts run natively without interpreter overhead—Succinct reports 100x speedups in real-world cases.
• Radical Simplicity: RISC-V’s spec is vastly simpler than EVM’s.
• EOF Advantages Preserved: Code modularity, static analysis support, larger contract sizes.
• Rich Developer Tooling: Solidity and Vyper can add backends; RISC-V supports mainstream languages like C/C++.
• Fewer Precompiles Needed: Most specialized functions become obsolete—only high-performance elliptic curve operations remain (and may fade with quantum resistance).

Short-Term Transition

While full migration takes time, immediate wins are possible:

• Increase contract size limits.
• Optimize stack instructions like DUP and SWAP.

These bridge the gap while preparing for the long-term shift.

Backward Compatibility Without Bloat

How do we modernize without breaking existing apps? The answer lies in redefining what “core” means.

Imagine three layers:

• Green (Core Consensus): Code every node must run—state computation, proof verification, block production.
• Orange (Historical Necessity): Legacy logic needed to parse old blocks but irrelevant for new clients or ZK systems.
• Yellow (Enhanced Functionality): Useful tools (e.g., ERC-4337 support) not required for consensus.

Only green code poses systemic risk. Orange and yellow can be encapsulated—preserved when needed but isolated from core logic.

👉 See how modular design enables backward compatibility in next-gen blockchains.

This mirrors Apple’s Rosetta: old apps run on new hardware via translation, without burdening the OS.

Migration Strategy

1. Dual VM Support: Native support for both EVM and RISC-V. Contracts interoperate seamlessly.
2. Precompile Replacement: Phase out precompiles via hard forks, replacing them with RISC-V implementations at the same addresses.
3. On-Chain EVM Interpreter: Deploy a RISC-V-based EVM interpreter as a smart contract. Existing contracts run inside it.
4. Gradual Sunset: Over years, new contracts use RISC-V natively; old ones run in the interpreter.

Eventually, consensus “natively” supports only RISC-V—but legacy logic remains accessible off-core.

Shared Components: The Hidden Path to Simplicity

True elegance comes not just from removing complexity but from reusing it across layers.

Unified Erasure Coding

Erasure coding is used in three key areas:

1. Data availability sampling (DAS)
2. Efficient P2P broadcasting
3. Distributed historical storage

Using the same scheme (e.g., Reed-Solomon or random linear codes) across all three brings:

• Code reuse
• Cross-layer data compatibility
• Unified root hashing for integrity checks

Even hybrid approaches (e.g., horizontal + vertical coding) must share finite field math to ensure interoperability.

Standardized Serialization: Adopt SSZ Everywhere

Today’s serialization is fragmented. But trends push toward unification:

• Account abstraction (EIP-7701) exposes full transactions to VMs.
• High gas limits move data into blobs.

Now is the time to standardize serialization across:

• Execution layer
• Consensus layer
• Smart contract ABI

SSZ is ideal because:

• Fast decoding (4-byte alignment, minimal edge cases)
• Already dominant in consensus
• ABI-compatible with existing tooling

Efforts are already underway—this should become official policy.

Unified Merkle Tree Structure

Post-EVM, the six-way Merkle Patricia Trie becomes a bottleneck. Switching to binary trees with better hash functions (e.g., SHA-2 or Poseidon) improves proof efficiency and reduces storage needs.

Crucially, use the same tree structure for both consensus and execution layers. This enables:

• Single codebase for data access
• Consistent proofs across stack
• Simpler light clients

👉 Explore how unified data structures enhance blockchain scalability and security.

From Complexity to Clarity: A Cultural Shift

Simplicity, like decentralization, is a prerequisite for resilience—but its benefits are delayed. Short-term complexity often promises quick wins.

Yet history favors simplicity. Bitcoin’s staying power proves it.

To achieve this, Ethereum should:

• Set explicit code-size targets (e.g., consensus logic under 5k lines).
• Isolate legacy code from critical paths.
• Prioritize simple solutions—even if less flashy.
• Encapsulate complexity instead of spreading it.
• Demand clear, verifiable guarantees for every design choice.

Inspired by projects like TinyGrad, Ethereum can cultivate a culture where elegance is valued as much as innovation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why not just keep improving the EVM incrementally?
A: Incremental changes face diminishing returns and high coordination costs. A clean-slate VM offers exponential gains with fewer long-term trade-offs.

Q: Will migrating to RISC-V break existing dApps?
A: No—via an on-chain interpreter, existing contracts continue running. Only new development shifts to native RISC-V.

Q: Isn’t reducing protocol complexity at odds with feature richness?
A: Not necessarily. Simplicity refers to core consensus logic. Features can still exist—just encapsulated outside critical paths.

Q: How does shared erasure coding improve security?
A: It reduces code duplication, minimizing bugs and inconsistencies across components that handle data availability and storage.

Q: Can SSZ replace ABI encoding without breaking tooling?
A: SSZ is ABI-compatible enough that tooling can adapt gradually. The transition is smoother than it appears.

Q: Is 3-slot finality realistic without sacrificing safety?
A: Yes—by leveraging advances in ZK proofs and bounded validator sets, safety can be maintained with far simpler mechanics than today’s epoch-based finality.

Keywords: Ethereum protocol simplicity, consensus layer optimization, EVM replacement, RISC-V blockchain, backward compatibility strategy, shared erasure coding, SSZ serialization standard