Reshaping Ethereum: The Path to Simplicity

Ethereum, as a global decentralized ledger, carries the important responsibility of holding civilizational assets and records, providing underlying support for key infrastructures such as finance, governance, and high-value data verification. To achieve this grand vision, the system must continuously improve in the two core capabilities of scalability and resilience.

The recent Fusaka hard fork has significantly improved the L2 data space, and the future roadmap also plans for similar expansions on L1. At the same time, Ethereum has transitioned to PoS consensus through the Merge, improving client diversity, and research on ZK verifiability and resistance to quantum attacks is also ongoing. However, in addition to performance improvements, there is another often-overlooked but equally important foundation of resilience: the simplicity of the protocol.

Concise: The Ultimate Protection of Decentralization

The awe of Bitcoin largely stems from the extreme simplicity of its protocol. Its core logic is clear and straightforward: the blockchain is composed of a series of blocks, each connected to the previous block by a hash, with PoW validating the validity of the blocks. The transaction fees contained in each block are generated by mining or previous transactions.

This simplicity brings many benefits: it lowers the barriers to understanding and development, reduces the complexity of long-term maintenance, decreases the risk of major security vulnerabilities, and lessens the possibility of manipulation by special interests. However, Ethereum's performance in this regard is not ideal, leading to unnecessary development costs, security risks, and a closed research culture.

In the next five years, Ethereum has the potential to approach Bitcoin in terms of simplicity. This goal can be approached from two aspects: the consensus layer and the execution layer.

Simplified Consensus Layer

The future new consensus mechanism will integrate the research achievements of the past decade in consensus theory, ZK-SNARK, and staking economics, aiming to build a long-term optimal and significantly simplified consensus layer. The main measures include:

1. Three-Slot Termination Mechanism: Simplifies the logic related to slots and epochs, removing complex mechanisms such as committee shuffling and synchronization committees.

2. Optimize fork choice and network structure: Use simpler fork choice rules and leverage STARK aggregation technology to reduce trust costs.

3. Redesign the state transition logic: simplify the mechanisms for validators to join, exit, withdraw, and switch keys.

Innovation of the Execution Layer

The execution layer is the most complex part of Ethereum, including the EVM instruction set, precompiled contracts, SELFDESTRUCT, and other hard-to-scale features. A feasible solution is to replace the EVM with a concise, high-performance, ZK-friendly VM (such as RISC-V). The benefits of doing so include:

• Performance significantly improved
• Seamless integration with mainstream programming languages
• Native support for zero-knowledge proof systems
• Clear structure, easy for auditing and security verification
• Reduce reliance on precompiled contracts

To ensure a smooth transition, existing contracts can continue to run in an EVM interpreter written in RISC-V, similar to how Apple uses Rosetta to migrate to ARM chips.

Build an Elegant System Foundation

The future Ethereum protocol should integrate more shared components to reduce the overall system complexity:

• Unified Erasure Code: Used for data availability sampling, historical storage, and P2P broadcast acceleration.
• Unified Serialization Format (SSZ): Improves efficiency and facilitates L2 decoupling.
• Unified state tree structure: adopting a binary tree more suitable for ZK proofs.

These improvements will make the underlying Ethereum no longer a product of various compromises, but rather a set of elegant "protocol blocks".

Embrace Simplicity, Return to the Source

Simplicity, like decentralization, is the cornerstone of system resilience. Truly valuing simplicity requires a cultural shift; its benefits may not be immediately quantifiable, but in the long run, the value of simplicity will gradually emerge.

Drawing on the ideas of tinygrad, we can set a target for the maximum number of lines of consensus code for Ethereum's long-term specifications, making its complexity close to that of Bitcoin. At the same time, the overall design should adhere to the "simplicity first" philosophy, favoring local encapsulation over systemic complexity, and prioritizing architectural choices that have clear attributes and verifiability.

Through these efforts, Ethereum is expected to return to a path of simplicity while maintaining strong functionality, laying a solid foundation for sustainable development in the future.