Vitalik calls for a ‘garbage collection’ function to stop Ethereum bloat

Vitalik Buterin warns that Ethereum’s push to add new features while preserving backward compatibility is inflating protocol complexity, calling for a “garbage collection” process.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is urging developers to confront the protocol bloat driven by an endless push to add new features while rarely removing old ones.

In a Sunday post on X, Buterin argued that true trustlessness and self-sovereignty depend less on raw decentralization metrics and more on simplicity.

“Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and it has 49% byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes fully verify everything with quantum-safe peerdas and starks, if the protocol is an unwieldy mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of PhD-level cryptography, ultimately that protocol fails,” he claimed

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