Catenaa, Saturday, May 10, 2025- Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has called for a sweeping redesign of the blockchain’s base layer, proposing a simplified architecture inspired by Bitcoin’s minimalist design to enhance security, scalability and long-term resilience.
In a blog post published May 3 titled “Simplifying the L1,” Buterin detailed his vision to streamline Ethereum’s increasingly complex core layers—consensus, execution and shared components. The move comes amid concerns that growing technical intricacy is hindering progress and raising the risk of bugs.
At the heart of the proposal is a new “3-slot finality” model that eliminates key elements of Ethereum’s current consensus design, including epochs, sync committees and validator shuffling. The simplified approach would reduce the number of active validators and introduce a safer fork choice rule.
On the execution layer, Buterin proposed replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine with a RISC-V-based, zero-knowledge (ZK)-friendly virtual machine. This would accelerate ZK proof generation by up to 100 times and offer a more auditable and developer-friendly framework. Backward compatibility would be ensured via a RISC-V interpreter for legacy EVM contracts.
Buterin also urged protocol-wide standardization to consolidate fragmented tools and formats—such as serialization, tree structures and erasure coding—to boost developer efficiency.
He likened simplicity to decentralization, proposing a “max line-of-code” principle that trims consensus-critical logic to its essentials, moving non-core functions outside the base protocol.
The overhaul comes as Ethereum faces criticism for unchecked token issuance and competition from L2 networks, adding urgency to Buterin’s call for reform.
