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The post Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Calls for ‘Garbage Collection’ to Save the Blockchain appeared first on Coinpedia Fintech News Ethereum’s biggest risk may no longer be competition, regulation, or scaling. According to Vitalik Buterin, the real threat is something more subtle: complexity. In a recent warning, Buterin argued that Ethereum’s long-term goals, trustlessness, self-sovereignty, and resilience, are being quietly undermined as the protocol grows larger, more technical, and harder to understand. His message was blunt. A blockchain does not become stronger just because it adds features. In many cases, it becomes weaker. Why “Trustless” Breaks When Nobody Understands the Code Ethereum is often praised for its decentralization. Thousands of nodes verify transactions, and no single party controls the network. But Buterin argues that decentralization alone is not enough. If a protocol becomes so complex that only a small group of experts can fully understand it, trust creeps back in. Users end up trusting developers, auditors, or cryptography specialists to explain what the system does and whether it is safe. At that point, the system may be decentralized in theory, but not in practice. Buterin calls this failing the “walkaway test.” If today’s client teams disappeared, could new developers realistically rebuild Ethereum clients from scratch and reach the same level of safety and quality? As the codebase grows and the cryptography becomes more exotic, that answer becomes less clear. Complexity Is Also a Security Risk Every added feature increases the number of ways different parts of the protocol can interact. Each interaction is another chance for something to break. Buterin warns that Ethereum development has often favored adding features to solve specific problems, while rarely removing old ones. Backward compatibility makes subtraction difficult, so the protocol slowly accumulates technical debt. Over time, this bloat makes Ethereum harder to secure, harder…

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Filed under: News - @ January 18, 2026 12:31 pm