Vitalik Buterin called for a ‘garbage dump’ to stop the inflammation of the atrium
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin urged developers to confront protocol bloat driven by endless pressure to add new features while rarely removing old ones.
In a Sunday post on X , Buterin argues that true trustlessness and self-sovereignty rest less on literal decentralized standards and less on simplicity.
Even though the protocol is highly decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes and has 49% Byzantine fault tolerance and nodes verify everything with quantum-safe peers and dense, if the protocol is a decentralized mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five PhD-level five forms.
According to Buterin, this complexity affects Ethereum (ETH) in three aspects. First, it undermines trust by forcing users to rely on “high priests” to explain what the protocol does. Second, it fails the so-called sidewalk test, because rebuilding high-quality customers becomes unrealistic if existing teams are lost. Third, it undermines self-sovereignty, as even highly technical users cannot test or reason with the system themselves.
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Buterin urged “garbage collection”.
Buterin warned that the issue is how protocol changes are evaluated. When upgrades are primarily judged on how disruptive they are to existing systems, backward compatibility tends to dominate decision-making. The result is a bias towards addition rather than subtraction, making the protocol increasingly cumbersome.
To counter this, he called for a clear “simplification” or “garbage collection” function in Ethereum's development process. The goal is to reduce total lines of code, limit reliance on complex cryptographic primitives, and introduce more variables—fixed rules that make it easier to predict and implement customer behavior.
Ethereum's CEO pointed to past changes as examples of effective cleanups. The shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) is a major reset, and recent efforts such as gas cost reforms aim to replace arbitrary rules with clear links to the actual use of resources. Future refinements may include downgrading from the original protocol to modern contracts, reducing the burden on client developers.
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The CEO of Solana Labs takes a different approach
Meanwhile, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said Solana (SOL) should remain in constant motion. Responding to a recent post by Buterin, Yakovenko said that while no single group is responsible for leading the changes, continuous iteration is essential to Solana's survival.
Buterin, on the other hand, argued that Ethereum would eventually have to pass the “walk test”, reaching a point where it could be safely and predictably for decades without continuous developer intervention.
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