Buterin Calls for ‘Garbage Collection’ to Unclog Ethereum’s Protocol Stack

Vitalik Buterin has renewed an argument that Ethereum’s long‑term decentralization depends not only on adding features but on actively pruning the protocol of legacy complexity. He warns that feature accumulation — driven by a strong bias toward backward compatibility and convenience — increases the audit surface, concentrates expertise, and raises operational costs for node operators. To counter this, Buterin proposes institutionalizing a ‘garbage collection’ mechanism inside the upgrade process so removals and demotions are evaluated alongside feature additions. Practically, that can mean migrating rarely used behaviors out of core clients into optional smart contracts or off‑chain layers, simplifying full‑node workflows to lower participation costs, and replacing ad hoc rules with clear, resource‑linked invariants. He also frames 2026 as a pivotal moment to rebalance priorities: improving private payment primitives, diversifying stablecoin models, and making cryptographic choices (including quantum‑resistant and zero‑knowledge techniques) that reduce reliance on niche expertise. Governance and DAO engineering are part of the package — Buterin suggests moving away from one‑size‑fits‑all token voting toward problem‑specific decision structures and better social UX, using toolchains and even local AI assistants to reduce voter burden. Supporters say these measures would shrink the set of cryptographic primitives to audit, make independent client implementations easier, and restore practical trustlessness by widening who can rebuild and verify the system. Critics counter that formal removals risk breaking existing applications, slow experimental rollout, and create political friction when stakeholders disagree about what to drop. Because the changes intersect engineering and governance, success will depend on coordinated migration paths, developer tooling, and incremental trials to avoid fragmentation. If executed with clear deprecation schedules and migration support, the cleanup could lower long‑term systemic risk and strengthen protocol autonomy; mismanaged, it could slow innovation and impose migration costs on ecosystem projects.