Simplifying the Ethereum Layer 1

Summary

Simplifying the L1 2025 May 03 See all posts Simplifying the L1 Special thanks to Fede, Danno Ferrin, Justin Drake, Ladislaus and Tim Beiko for feedback and review Ethereum aims to be the world ledger: the platform that stores civilization's assets and records, the base layer for finance, governance, high-value data authentication, and more. This requires two things: scalability and resilience. The Fusaka hard fork aims to increase the amount of data space available to L2 data by 10x, and the current proposed 2026 roadmap includes a similarly large increase for the L1. Meanwhile, the merge upgraded Ethereum to proof of stake, Ethereum's client diversity has improved rapidly, work on ZK verifiability, work quantum resistance is progressing, and applications are getting more and more robust. The goal of this post will be to shine the light on an aspect of resilience (and ultimately scalability) that is just as important, and easy to undervalue: the protocol's simplicity. One of the best things about Bitcoin is how beautifully simple the protocol is: There is a chain, which is made up of a series of blocks. Each block is connected to the previous block by a hash. Each block's validity is verified by proof of work, which means... checking that the first few bytes of its hash are zeroes. Each block contains transactions. Transactions spend coins that were either created through the mining process, or outputted by previous transactions. And that's pretty much it. Even a smart high school student is capable of fully wrapping their head around and understanding the Bitcoin protocol. A programmer is capable of writing a client as a hobby project. Keeping the protocol simple brings a number of benefits that are key to Bitcoin or Ethereum being a credibly neutral and globally trusted base layer: It makes the protocol simpler to reason about, increasing the number of people who understand and can participate in protocol research, development and governance. It reduces the risk ...