Vitalik Buterin Plans To Make Ethereum As ‘Simple As Bitcoin’ In Five Years — Here’s How

Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has proposed new architecture and protocol-wide standards to make the chain simpler, faster, and easier to maintain, drawing inspiration from Bitcoin’s minimalist design.

In a May 3 blog post titled “Simplifying the L1,” Buterin laid out a vision to replace Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM) with a new RISC-V, to achieve radical efficiency gains in zero-knowledge proofs.

Buterin Suggests Simplifying Ethereum

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has proposed changes that could help Ethereum “become close to as simple as Bitcoin” within five years.

“One of the best things about Bitcoin is how beautifully simple the protocol is,” Buterin wrote, describing how Bitcoin transactions and proofs work.

Keeping the protocol simple brings benefits that are key to making it “a credibly neutral and globally trusted base layer,” Buterin posited.

Although recent network upgrades such as proof-of-stake (PoS) and Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) integration have made Ethereum more robust, the co-founder indicated that technical complexity has resulted in bloated development cycles, higher costs, and greater risks of bugs: 

“Historically, Ethereum has often not done this (sometimes because of my own decisions), and this has contributed to much of our excessive development expenditure, all kinds of security risk, and insularity of R&D culture, often in pursuit of benefits that have proven illusory.”

Buterin emphasized that the benefits of his proposed changes “do not appear immediately” in the short term. But, “in the long term, it will be worth it.”

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Caring about simplicity is, like decentralization, a short-term cost for the sake of benefits that do not appear immediately. But in the long term, it will be worth it. Let&#39;s make each part of the ethereum spec a place where things like this can happen:<a href=”https://t.co/1yIiWfAbH8″>https://t.co/1yIiWfAbH8</a></p>&mdash; vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) <a href=”https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1918562039565566177?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>May 3, 2025</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

Replacing EVM With RISC-V To Boost Scalability

Buterin is proposing boosting Ethereum’s scalability by swapping the current EVM bytecode for RISC-V as the virtual machine language of smart contracts. The transition to RISC-V would see an open-source instruction set architecture defining how software communicates with processors using a minimalist design philosophy.

For Ethereum, the proposed radical change would enable Ethereum to run faster by removing extra translation steps. 

Moreover, applications could work directly on the execution layer, potentially making some operations up to 100 times faster and slashing on-chain execution costs by as much as 100X while keeping existing smart contracts working.

In the near term, Ethereum is scheduled to undergo its Pectra upgrade on May 7, enhancing user experience, increasing rollup scalability, and boosting the upper limit for validator stakes.