Reshaping Ethereum: A Path to Simplicity

The vision of Ethereum is to become the world's digital ledger, supporting critical infrastructure for finance, governance, and high-value data certification. Achieving this goal requires a balance between scalability and resilience.

Recent upgrades have brought significant performance improvements to Ethereum. However, in addition to scalability and performance, there is another equally important but often overlooked foundation of resilience: the simplicity of the protocol.

Simplified: The foundation of decentralization

The reason Bitcoin is so remarkable largely stems from the extreme simplicity of its protocol. This simplicity brings numerous advantages:

• Easier to understand widely, lowering the threshold for research and development
• Reduce the cost of developing new infrastructure
• Reduce the complexity of long-term maintenance
• Reduce the risk of major security vulnerabilities
• Reduce the possibility of being manipulated by special interests.

Historically, Ethereum has performed poorly in this regard, leading to unnecessary development costs, security risks, and a closed research culture. In the coming years, Ethereum is expected to approach Bitcoin in terms of simplicity, which requires efforts from both the consensus layer and the execution layer.

Simplified Consensus Layer

The consensus mechanism of the future will integrate the research achievements of the past decade in areas such as consensus theory, zero-knowledge proofs, and staking economics. Key improvements include:

• Three-slot termination mechanism: Simplified block confirmation logic
• Optimized fork selection and network structure
• Simplify state transition related logic

These improvements will significantly reduce the complexity of the consensus layer, enhancing security and efficiency.

Innovation Execution Layer

The execution layer has always been the complex core of Ethereum. In the future, a simpler and more efficient virtual machine like RISC-V may replace the current EVM. This transformation could bring:

• Significant performance improvement
• Better compatibility with mainstream programming languages
• More suitable for zero-knowledge proof systems
• Easier auditing and security verification
• Reduce dependence on precompiled contracts

This migration process will adopt a progressive approach to ensure the continued operation of existing contracts.

Integration of Shared Components

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

• Unified erasure code
• Unified serialization format
• Unified state tree structure

These improvements will make the Ethereum underlying more elegant and efficient.

Embrace the way of simplicity

The pursuit of simplicity requires a cultural shift. While it may face challenges in the short term, in the long run, simplicity will bring great value to Ethereum. Future Ethereum development should adhere to the principle of "prioritizing simpler solutions," aiming to create a protocol that is both powerful and easy to understand and maintain.

Through these improvements, Ethereum is expected to significantly enhance its simplicity and maintainability while maintaining its powerful functionality, laying a more solid foundation for future development.