Simplifying Ethereum's Underlying Layer: Reshaping the Beauty of the Protocol

The vision of Ethereum is to become a global ledger, providing underlying support for critical infrastructures such as finance, governance, and high-value data certification. Achieving this goal requires a balance between scalability and resilience.

Recent developments have brought significant improvements to Ethereum. The Fusaka hard fork has greatly increased the L2 data space, and the future roadmap also plans to further expand L1. Meanwhile, after transitioning to PoS consensus, client diversity has improved, and research on ZK verifiability and resistance to quantum attacks is also ongoing. However, in addition to performance improvements, there is another equally important but easily overlooked aspect: the simplicity of the protocol.

Simplicity is a key attribute of decentralized systems. The Bitcoin protocol is renowned for its extreme simplicity, which allows high school students to understand its operating principles, and programmers can even implement the client themselves. This simplicity brings multiple advantages: it lowers the threshold for research and development, reduces the complexity of long-term maintenance, decreases the risk of major security vulnerabilities, and minimizes the possibility of manipulation by special interests.

In contrast, Ethereum performs poorly in terms of simplicity, leading to unnecessary development costs, security risks, and a closed research culture. In the coming years, Ethereum has the potential to approach Bitcoin in terms of simplicity, which requires improvements from both the consensus layer and the execution layer.

At the consensus level, the new mechanism in the future will integrate the research achievements of the past decade in consensus theory, ZK-SNARK, and staking economics. Key improvements include the introduction of a three-slot finality mechanism, simplification of fork choice rules and network structure, as well as optimization of state transition logic. These changes will significantly reduce code complexity and enhance the security and efficiency of the system.

The simplification of the execution layer is a more challenging task. The current EVM has many issues, such as a complex instruction set, difficult-to-understand precompiled contracts, and the burden of historical compatibility. A possible solution is to replace the EVM with a concise, high-performance, and ZK-friendly VM (like RISC-V). This would not only enhance performance but also integrate better with mainstream programming languages, facilitating auditing and security verification.

To achieve a smooth transition, a strategy similar to Apple's transition to ARM chips can be adopted, allowing old contracts to run in the EVM interpreter written for the new VM, thereby enabling a pain-free upgrade.

In addition, integrating more shared components is also an important way to simplify the system. For example, a unified erasure code can be used for data availability sampling, historical storage, and P2P broadcast acceleration; a unified serialization format can improve efficiency and facilitate L2 decoupling; a unified state tree structure is more suitable for ZK proofs.

Pursuing simplicity requires a cultural shift. While it may involve giving up some features and putting in extra effort in the short term, in the long run, simplicity will bring tremendous value to the system. Drawing inspiration from tinygrad, setting a maximum line count goal for the consensus code of Ethereum can help control complexity within a reasonable range. At the same time, the design philosophy should lean towards choosing simpler solutions, prioritizing local encapsulation over systemic complexity.

Through these efforts, Ethereum is expected to reshape the beauty of its protocol while maintaining strong functionality, laying a more solid foundation for future development.