TechFlow news, September 30 — Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article discussing whether "Ethereum should 'enshrine' more features within the protocol." The article points out that creating minimalist software allows easy adaptation to diverse user needs and avoids the bloat often seen in software development. However, blockchains are not personal computing operating systems—they are social systems. This implies that enshrining certain functionalities directly into the protocol can be justified.
In many cases, these examples resemble what we've observed with account abstraction. Yet we’ve also learned new lessons:
- Enshrining functionality can help avoid centralization risks in other layers of the stack;
- Enshrining too much may excessively increase the trust and governance burden on the protocol;
- Over-enshrinement can make the protocol overly complex;
- In the long term, enshrining features might backfire, as user needs are unpredictable.
Furthermore, cases such as liquid staking, ZK-EVMs, and precompiles suggest a possible middle path: minimal viable enshrinement. Instead of enshrining entire functionalities, the protocol could include only specific components that address critical challenges—making the functionality easier to implement without being overly prescriptive or narrow. Examples include:
- Rather than enshrining a full liquid staking system, modify slashing rules to make trustless liquid staking more feasible;
- Rather than adding more precompiles, enshrine EVM-MAX and/or SIMD to make broad categories of operations easier to implement efficiently;
- Instead of enshrining the entire concept of rollups, simply enshrine EVM verification.
