From Cointelegraph

May 3, 2025 4:30 am:

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin aims to simplify Ethereum’s base protocol, drawing inspiration from Bitcoin’s minimalist design. Recent upgrades like proof-of-stake and zk-SNARK integration have made Ethereum more robust, but technical complexity has led to bloated development cycles and higher costs. Buterin praises Bitcoin for its simplicity and calls for streamlining Ethereum for efficiency and long-term scalability.

Buterin’s vision includes a “3-slot finality” model to simplify Ethereum’s consensus layer, eliminating complex components and making the network safer. Proposed improvements also involve transitioning from the Ethereum Virtual Machine to a simpler, ZK-friendly virtual machine like RISC-V for better performance and protocol simplification. Buterin suggests running legacy EVM contracts concurrently with RISC-V during a transitional phase for backward compatibility.

Buterin advocates for protocol-wide standardization to reduce redundant complexity and streamline Ethereum’s tooling and infrastructure. He suggests adopting a “max line-of-code” target to keep consensus-critical logic lean and auditable, similar to what Tinygrad does. Non-critical legacy features would be kept outside the core specification to simplify Ethereum’s architecture.

As Ethereum continues to lose market share to competing blockchains, Buterin’s proposal to simplify Ethereum comes at a crucial time. During a panel discussion, CEO of data service Nansen, Alex Svanevik, noted Ethereum’s declining dominance among L1 blockchain networks. Buterin’s call for simplification aims to address these challenges and make Ethereum more efficient and competitive in the blockchain space.

Read more at Cointelegraph: Vitalik wants to make Ethereum ‘as simple as Bitcoin’ in 5 years