Vitalik in conversation with Xiao Feng in Hong Kong: Simplifying the Ethereum system is the top priority; if it becomes too complex for more than 50 people to understand, developers and users will be scared away.

On April 22, Vitalik Buterin engaged in a dialogue with Xiao Feng, Chairman of Wanxiang Blockchain, at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Festival, identifying "system simplification" as Ethereum's core priority. Vitalik emphasized that excessive protocol complexity leads to a situation where only a handful of people can understand the underlying layers, ultimately causing the system to lose its trustless nature. During the conversation, he specifically highlighted the hardware layer and quantum-resistant algorithms, stressing that improvements at the software layer alone are insufficient. (Previous coverage: Xiao Feng's Hong Kong dialogue with Vitalik: Learning Chinese in a year, Ethereum Foundation to open a branch in Hong Kong...) (Background: Vitalik's Hong Kong Web3 Festival speech: Ethereum is not competing in a TPS performance arms race; safety first, autonomous execution for a decade even without developers) If a system is so complex that only 50 people can understand it, it effectively forces everyone else to trust those 50 people—this was Vitalik Buterin's most direct characterization of Ethereum's "simplification roadmap" during his April 22 dialogue with Xiao Feng. The discussion centered on the "future development prospects of Ethereum applications" at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Festival, marking their second public dialogue at the same event since last year. Vitalik distinguished between two distinct types of "simplification": one is iPhone-style application-layer simplification—where the user interface is clean and intuitive, but the backend system remains intricate; the other is true protocol-layer simplification, which compresses the specifications themselves so that any capable engineer can understand them from scratch. He emphasized that both are important and indispensable. Application-layer simplification determines whether developers can get started quickly and whether the user experience is smooth; protocol-layer simplification determines the system's foundation of trust. Vitalik's logic is clear: the higher the barrier to entry, the fewer people can participate, and fewer people mean higher centralization risks. A centralized system is, by definition, no longer "trustless." During the dialogue, Vitalik described Ethereum's multi-layer architecture: Protocol, Application, Hardware, and Security. He particularly emphasized that focusing solely on software-side improvements is not enough, and the development of the hardware layer also requires continuous attention. This stance echoes his consistent advocacy regarding technical roadmaps in recent years. In April 2025, Vitalik proposed replacing the existing EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) with the RISC-V architecture as the execution layer. The advantage of RISC-V lies in its minimalist specifications—a complete interpreter can be written in a few hundred lines of code, and the execution performance for certain applications can be improved by over 100 times. This path was systematically defined in his May 2025 blog post, "Simplifying the L1," which became the technical foundation for the 2026 roadmap. Regarding quantum-resistant algorithms, Vitalik stated that relevant solutions have matured. He personally prefers GeoHash-type algorithms and pointed out that Ethereum's goal is to possess both quantum resistance and AI resistance. This is another main thread of the Ethereum 2026 roadmap—the Binary State Tree upgrade and the large-scale rewriting of the execution layer are all centered on the goal of ensuring the system can operate securely for decades to come. This directly echoes the "Walkaway Test" he proposed in his keynote speech two days earlier on April 20: The Ethereum protocol must meet the standard of being able to run autonomously for decades without any developer intervention. The prerequisite for passing the Walkaway Test is that the protocol itself must be sufficiently simple and secure. On the other side of the dialogue, Xiao Feng, representing Wanxiang Blockchain, explicitly stated his willingness to restart Ethereum workshops and hackathons in multiple cities across mainland China, providing venue support for the penetration of the Ethereum ecosystem within the Chinese-speaking community. This dialogue spanned both technical blueprints and ecosystem layout. Vitalik used the metaphor of a "public bulletin board" to describe the essence of Ethereum—applications post messages on it, everyone can see them in the correct order, and with the addition of computing power, users can own shared digital objects controlled by code. The destination of the simplification roadmap is not to make Ethereum "light," but to allow more people to truly participate in, verify, and trust the system itself.