Vitalik Wants to Slim Ethereum Down—Bye Bloat, Hello ZK Power
Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin just dropped a 🔥 blog post that basically says: Ethereum’s gotten too complicated, and it’s time to chill. Titled “Simplifying the L1”, the post lays out a bold plan to strip down Ethereum’s base layer for better security, faster scaling, and easier dev life.
What’s the vibe?
Vitalik’s like: “Let’s stop doing the most.” He wants Ethereum to go from being a complex machine to something more like Bitcoin—clean, secure, and minimal. Too many moving parts = more bugs, longer dev timelines, and bad vibes for light clients.
The Big Switches:
- 3-Slot Finality: Say goodbye to epochs and sync committees. This new model reduces validator chaos and makes the chain easier to understand and way less attack-prone.
- RISC-V Virtual Machine: Vitalik wants to swap the old EVM for a ZK-friendly, open-source RISC-V engine. Why? Because it’s lean, mean, and could speed up ZK proof gen by 100x.
- No More Fragmentation: One erasure code, one serialization format (SSZ), one tree structure. The whole protocol gets a uniform glow-up.
The Big Idea:
Vitalik wants to put a cap on complexity, much like the way Tinygrad limits code lines in ML models. Legacy and non-critical stuff can still exist—but outside the sacred “core.”
And there’s more:
Former dev Eric Connor thinks Ethereum could be the key to fixing AI’s trust problems. Decentralized AI? Transparent models? Zero-knowledge privacy? Ethereum’s got the tools.
But not everyone’s cheering. VC Nic Carter says Ethereum’s L2s are leeching value from the base layer, and that ETH’s wild token minting culture is “killing itself from the inside.” Harsh, but it shows the tension.
TL;DR:
Vitalik’s trying to give Ethereum a major clean-up. He wants less complexity, more ZK power, and a leaner core—plus Ethereum might just save AI along the way.
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