The post Vitalik Buterin Highlights Ethereum’s Biggest Long-Term Risk appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Ethereum Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has issued a pointed reminder to the crypto industry: real decentralization is not just about node counts, cryptography, or advanced engineering – it is about whether ordinary developers can actually understand and rebuild the system if they have to. In a recent post on X, Buterin argued that protocol simplicity is one of the most overlooked pillars of trustlessness and self-sovereignty. Key Takeaways Vitalik Buterin warns that growing protocol complexity undermines trustlessness by forcing users to rely on a small group of experts rather than the code itself. Constant feature additions risk bloating Ethereum over time, increasing security risks and making the network harder to maintain and rebuild. Long-term decentralization requires active simplification, not just new upgrades, if Ethereum is to remain self-sovereign for decades.  In his view, a blockchain can check every technical box on paper and still fail its core mission if it becomes so complex that only a small group of experts truly understands how it works. When complexity quietly reintroduces trust Buterin’s argument cuts against a common assumption in crypto: that more features and more advanced cryptography automatically make a protocol stronger. He warns that once a system grows into hundreds of thousands of lines of code and relies on multiple forms of highly specialized cryptography, it creates a new kind of centralization. At that point, users are no longer trusting the protocol itself – they are trusting a small circle of specialists to explain what the protocol does and why it is safe. That undermines the idea of trustlessness. It also weakens the “walkaway test”: if current client teams disappear, rebuilding the software from scratch becomes unrealistic for newcomers. From Buterin’s perspective, true self-sovereignty means that even highly technical users should be able to inspect the system and convince themselves…

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Filed under: News - @ January 18, 2026 3:21 pm