Buterin urges Ethereum simplification to achieve true trustlessness

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is advocating for a strategic shift in how the Ethereum protocol evolves, arguing that simplicity is essential to achieving genuine trustlessness—a fundamental ideal of blockchain technology.

In a series of recent statements on X, Buterin that while Ethereum operates without centralized control, its growing architectural complexity risks placing implicit trust in a small circle of experts rather than in the protocol itself. “An important and underrated form of trustlessness is increasing the number of people who can actually understand the whole protocol from top to bottom,” he

Traditionally, blockchain trustlessness means that users dont have to place faith in intermediaries — such as servers or developers — because the rules are enforced by open-source code and decentralized consensus. However, Buterin warns that if only a handful of developers can genuinely grasp the full stack, users still end up trusting that inner circle.

is calling for radical simplification and trustless design, which can be strengthened by reducing its dependency on specialized mechanisms and standardized key protocol features that can be audited and modified by new entrants. Just last year, Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation published an on-chain “Trustless Manifesto” that explicitly asserts a reluctance for developers to sacrifice decentralization for the sake of convenience.