Vitalik Urges ’Protocol Simplicity’ — Prune Legacy Features to Preserve Ethereum

Ethereum co‑founder Vitalik Buterin is calling for deliberate “protocol simplicity”: a program of pruning legacy code and complex features from Ethereum’s core to improve security, auditability and long‑term maintainability. Buterin warns that accumulated complexity creates a “High Priest” problem where only specialists fully understand the system and that this undermines decentralization and the “walkaway test” (the ability for new teams to take over maintenance). He recommends moving seldom‑used or intricate functionality out of the core protocol into smart contracts (for example using account abstraction to handle legacy transaction types and running the EVM as a contract on a simpler runtime), removing features that add permanent bloat, and adopting formal “simplification” or “garbage collection” processes. Proposed measures include isolating old clients, running older protocol versions in parallel to reduce client burdens, incremental gas‑fee adjustments, and broader design changes (e.g., Lean consensus or prior shifts like PoS). Buterin frames Ethereum’s first 15 years as experimental and says the next phase must prioritise clarity, verifiability and fewer invariants so many developers can audit and rebuild the chain decades from now. For traders, this signals potential future protocol refactors, deprecations and tooling changes that could affect client implementations and some smart‑contract behaviors — outcomes that may create short‑term disruption for specific integrations but aim to strengthen long‑term network resilience.