Reshaping Ethereum: The Path to Simplicity

The vision of Ethereum is to become a global ledger, supporting critical infrastructures such as finance, governance, and high-value data authentication. To achieve this goal, both scalability and resilience must be prioritized as two core capabilities.

Recent developments have brought significant improvements to Ethereum. The Fusaka hard fork will greatly enhance L2 data space, and the 2026 roadmap also plans for similar expansions on L1. Meanwhile, Ethereum has transitioned to PoS consensus, client diversity has improved, and research on ZK verifiability and quantum resistance continues to advance. However, in addition to scalability and performance, there is another equally important yet often overlooked foundation of resilience: the simplicity of the protocol.

Concise: The Ultimate Shield of Decentralization

The most commendable feature of Bitcoin is the extreme simplicity of its protocol. A high school student who understands programming can fully grasp the operational principles of the Bitcoin protocol and even implement a client on their own. This simplicity brings numerous benefits: it lowers the barriers to research and development, reduces maintenance complexity, lowers security risks, and decreases the likelihood of manipulation by special interests.

In contrast, Ethereum performs poorly in terms of simplicity, leading to unnecessary development costs, security risks, and a closed research culture. In the next five years, Ethereum has the potential to approach Bitcoin in simplicity, primarily focusing on the consensus layer and execution layer.

Simplified Consensus Layer

The new consensus mechanism in the future will integrate the accumulation of the past decade in consensus theory, ZK-SNARK, and staking economics, with the aim of building a long-term optimal and significantly simplified consensus layer. Key measures include:

1. Three-slot termination mechanism: Simplify the logic of slots and epochs, removing complex mechanisms such as committee shuffle.
2. Simplify fork choice and network structure: adopt simpler fork choice rules and introduce STARK aggregation.
3. Redesign the logic related to validators: simplify mechanisms for joining, exiting, withdrawing, and key switching.

Simplified Execution Layer

The execution layer is the most complex part of Ethereum, including the EVM instruction set, precompiled contracts, and historical compatibility burdens. One possible solution is to replace the EVM with a concise, high-performance, ZK-friendly VM (such as RISC-V). This could lead to significant performance improvements, better support for mainstream programming languages, and a simplified security audit process.

The migration process will adopt a progressive approach, similar to how Apple transitioned to ARM chips using Rosetta. Old contracts will continue to run in the EVM interpreter, which itself is a contract written in RISC-V.

Build a more elegant system foundation

The future Ethereum protocol should integrate more "shared components" to reduce system complexity:

1. Unified erasure code: used for data availability sampling, historical storage, and P2P broadcast acceleration.
2. Standardized Serialization Format (SSZ): Improve efficiency and facilitate L2 decoupling.
3. Unified state tree structure: Adopting a binary tree structure more suitable for ZK proofs.

These improvements will turn the Ethereum underlying into "protocol building blocks" built on engineering aesthetics rather than being "a patchwork of various compromises".

Embrace simplicity, welcome the future

A real emphasis on simplicity requires a cultural shift. Although the benefits of simplicity are difficult to quantify immediately, their value will gradually become apparent over time. Drawing on the ideas of tinygrad, Ethereum can set a target for the maximum number of lines of consensus code for long-term standards, striving to make the complexity of the consensus critical path approach the simplicity level of Bitcoin.

At the same time, the overall design should adhere to the principle of "prioritizing simpler solutions", leaning towards local encapsulation rather than systemic complexity, and prioritizing architecture choices with clear attributes and verifiability. Through these efforts, Ethereum is expected to return to a path of simplicity while maintaining innovation, laying a solid foundation for sustainable development in the future.