With a major update to the protocol’s long-term roadmap, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is calling for the simplification of ETH’s basic protocols to make the network more efficient and resilient.
How can Ethereum achieve the simplicity of the protocol?
In a May 3rd blog post entitled “Simplifying L1,” Buterin shared his perspective on the need to simplify the Ethereum network. The founder of Crypto praised how beautiful and simple the Bitcoin blockchain is.
Butarin said:
Even smart high school students can fully wrap their heads and understand the Bitcoin protocol. Programmers can write clients as hobby projects.
Source: vitalik.eth
According to Buterin, Protocol Simplicity offers a variety of important benefits to ensure that blockchain networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum remain a trustworthy, neutral and globally reliable base layer. Meanwhile, infrastructure costs, long-term maintenance costs, and risk of bugs and malicious attacks will also be reduced.
In a blog post, Buterin also explained how an Ethereum network, as simple as Bitcoin, can get closer in five years. According to the co-founders, one of the three ways to achieve this simplicity is to use a more optimal consensus layer, with a final redesign of the three slots in particular.
Additionally, Buterin mentions execution layer simplification and complains about the unnecessary increase in complexity of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). To fix this, the co-founder of Crypto proposed replacing the EVM with a new minimal virtual machine (such as RISC-V).
The co-founder said:
The biggest challenge in meaningfully simplifying (or improving) any part of the EVM is how to balance maintaining reverse compatibility for existing applications with achieving desired goals.
Finally, Buterin outlined that the third “most underestimated” way to enhance the simplicity of a protocol is to share one standard across different parts of the protocol. “Usually, there is little or no benefit to doing the same thing in different locations using different protocols,” said the co-founder of Ethereum.
Buterin concluded that simplicity is very similar to decentralization. This is what is needed to achieve blockchain resilience.
Ethereum price overview
While Buterin is trying to adjust the Ethereum Network, ETH investors hope that these enhancements will be converted into the value of ether tokens. Eth’s performance has been overwhelming so far in 2025, registering four months to start the year.
At the time of this writing, the price of ether was around $1,817, reflecting a 1.6% decline over the past 24 hours. It is worth mentioning that Ethereum prices have enjoyed bullish momentum over the past two weeks, and its value has increased by almost 15% over that period.
The price of ETH on the daily timeframe | Source: ETHUSDT chart on TradingView
ISTOCK featured images, TradingView chart
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