Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned that constant feature additions without removing legacy components are inflating Ethereum’s protocol complexity.
In a Sunday post, Buterin said long-term trustlessness and self-sovereignty depend more on simplicity than raw decentralisation metrics.
“Even if a protocol is super decentralised with hundreds of thousands of nodes, if it is an unwieldy mess of code and complex cryptography, ultimately that protocol fails,”
Vitalik Buterin said.
Buterin argued that excessive complexity forces users to rely on experts to interpret the protocol, weakening trustlessness.
He said growing bloat risks failing the “walkaway test,” where a network should function even if its original developers disappear.
Buterin warned that self-sovereignty is eroded when even advanced users can no longer understand or audit the system.
He said backward compatibility often dominates upgrade decisions, creating a bias toward adding features rather than removing them.
To address this, Buterin called for a formal “garbage collection” or simplification function in Ethereum’s development process.