Buterin urges ‘garbage collection’ to simplify Ethereum and curb protocol bloat

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is urging developers to tackle protocol bloat and introduce explicit “garbage collection” into Ethereum’s development process, he said in a Sunday post on X. Buterin argued that true trustlessness and self-sovereignty depend more on simplicity than raw decentralization metrics.

“Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes... ultimately that protocol fails,” he claimed, saying complexity undermines Ethereum by weakening trustlessness, failing the so-called walkaway test and eroding self-sovereignty. He warned the bias toward backward compatibility steers upgrades toward additions rather than removals and called for an explicit “simplification” or “garbage collection” function.

The aim, he said, would be to reduce total lines of code, limit reliance on complex cryptographic primitives and introduce more invariants so client behavior is easier to predict and implement. Buterin pointed to past changes as cleanup examples, citing the shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake as a large-scale reset and noting recent gas cost reforms that seek clearer links to resource usage.

He suggested future cleanups could demote rarely used features from the core protocol into smart contracts to ease the burden on client developers. Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko responded that a blockchain must keep evolving to meet developer and user needs, saying continuous iteration is essential.

Key Topics

Crypto, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum, Garbage Collection, Protocol Bloat, Solana Labs