Buterin urges Ethereum simplification to achieve true trustlessness

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is advocating for a strategic shift in how the Ethereum protocol evolves, arguing that simplicity is essential to achieving genuine trustlessness—a fundamental ideal of blockchain technology.

In a series of recent statements on X, Buterin underscored that while Ethereum operates without centralized control, its growing architectural complexity risks placing implicit trust in a small circle of experts rather than in the protocol itself. “An important and underrated form of trustlessness is increasing the number of people who can actually understand the whole protocol from top to bottom,” he wrote.

Traditionally, blockchain trustlessness means that users don’t have to place faith in intermediaries — such as servers or developers — because the rules are enforced by open-source code and decentralized consensus. However, Buterin warns that if only a handful of developers can genuinely grasp the full stack, users still end up trusting that inner circle.

To address this, developers are also exploring technologically “stateless clients” and node-lightening schemes, allowing participants to engage without storing any portion of the entire blockchain state, thereby reducing the hardware barrier to participation and centralization. 

Buterin advocates for radical simplification and trustless design

Buterin is calling for radical simplification and trustless design, which can be strengthened by reducing its dependency on specialized mechanisms and standardized key protocol features that can be audited and modified by new entrants. Just last year, Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation published an on-chain “Trustless Manifesto” that explicitly asserts a reluctance for developers to sacrifice decentralization for the sake of convenience.

The manifesto also issues a warning that benevolent shortcuts, such as default reliance on hosted nodes or centralized relayers, will, over time, gradually erode the integrity of a permissionless network. It calls on builders to create systems in which everyone can verify protocol rules, and no one holds crucial secrets or assumes the role of an irreplaceable intermediary. 

The conversations in the industry are not limited to Layer‑2 designs either. Buterin suggests that developers optimize Layer-2 protocols by heavily relying on Ethereum’s base layer for security and decentralization, without reusing complex logic from one chain to another. By minimizing their efforts in this way, much of the system’s complexity is simplified, and the performance overhead falls dramatically.

Ethereum roadmap boosts usability and simplifies the network

Ethereum’s official roadmap supports these simplification goals with scaling and usability evolution. That said, evolving smart contract wallets that hide gas fees and key management are helping the network connections more closely resemble what a web-based app looks like. 

The players in the market have also been focusing on similar upgrades, such as enhancing blob throughput and implementing Peer-to-Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS), which increases the throughput of transactions for nodes, thereby improving the transaction throughput performance over a node. From a usability perspective, “stateless” client structures and lightweight protocol components could lower the costs associated with running nodes (which are an essential aspect of decentralization). 

While pure statelessness remains a foreseeable project, milestones such as Verkle Trees and data compression techniques are already being tested and implemented. They could eventually lighten some of the load on node operators, allowing more participants to verify the blockchain autonomously. 

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