Protocol complexity is being inflated by Ethereum’s push to add new features while preserving backward compatibility, according to a warning from Vitalik Buterin, who is calling for a “garbage collection” process.
Developers are being urged by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to confront the protocol bloat driven by an endless push to add new features while rarely removing old ones.
A Sunday post on X was used by Buterin to argue that true trustlessness and self-sovereignty depend less on raw decentralization metrics and more on simplicity.
“Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and it has 49% byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes fully verify everything with quantum-safe peerdas and starks, if the protocol is an unwieldy mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of PhD-level cryptography, ultimately that protocol fails,”
he claimed
According to Buterin, Ethereum’s three primary pillars are undermined by this complexity. First, trustlessness is weakened by forcing users to rely on “high priests” to explain what the protocol actually does. Second, it fails the so-called walkaway test, because rebuilding high-quality clients becomes unrealistic if existing teams disappear. Third, it erodes self-sovereignty, as even highly technical users can no longer inspect or reason about the system on their own.
Buterin Calls for “Garbage Collection” to Tackle Ethereum Bloat
Buterin warned that the issue is rooted in how protocol changes are evaluated. When upgrades are judged mainly by how disruptive they are to existing systems, decision-making is tended to be dominated by backward compatibility. The result is a bias toward additions rather than subtractions, causing the protocol to grow heavier over time.
An explicit “simplification” or “garbage collection” function in Ethereum’s development process was called for by Buterin to counter this trend. The goal would be to reduce total lines of code, limit reliance on complex cryptographic primitives, and introduce more invariants — fixed rules that make client behavior easier to predict and implement.
Past transitions were pointed to by the Ethereum co-founder as examples of effective cleanup. The shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) was one large-scale reset, while more recent efforts, such as gas cost reforms, aim to replace arbitrary rules with clearer links to actual resource usage. Future cleanups could involve demoting rarely used features from the core protocol into smart contracts, reducing the burden on client developers.
Solana Labs CEO Favors an Alternative Approach
Constant motion must be maintained by Solana, according to Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, who argues that a blockchain that stops evolving to meet developer and user needs risks becoming irrelevant. Responding to a recent post by Buterin, Yakovenko claimed that continuous iteration is essential for Solana’s survival, even if no single group is responsible for driving those changes.
In contrast, it has been argued by Buterin that Ethereum should eventually pass the “walkaway test,” reaching a point where it can operate securely and predictably for decades without ongoing developer intervention.
