Vitalik: It is reasonable to "encapsulate" certain functions in the Ethereum protocol, and we can follow the minimum viable encapsulation route

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article discussing whether Ethereum should "enshrine" more things in the protocol. The article points out that creating minimalist software can easily adapt to the different needs of users and avoid the curse of software bloat. However, blockchain is not a personal computing operating system, but a social system. This means that it is reasonable to encapsulate certain functions in the protocol.
In many cases, these other examples are similar to what we saw with account abstraction. But we also learned some new lessons:
Encapsulating functionality can help avoid centralization risks in other areas of the stack;
- Encapsulating too much content may overly expand the trust and governance burden of the protocol;
- Encapsulating too much content may make the protocol too complex;
- Encapsulating functionality can be counterproductive in the long run because user needs are unpredictable.
In addition, the cases of liquidity staking, ZK-EVM, and precompilation show the possibility of a middle path: minimal viable enshrinement. Rather than encapsulating the entire functionality, protocols can include specific parts that solve key challenges, making the functionality easy to implement without being too paranoid or too narrow. Examples include:
- Instead of encapsulating a complete liquidity staking system, it is better to change the staking penalty rules to make trustless liquidity staking more feasible;
- Rather than wrapping more precompilers, wrap EVM-MAX and/or SIMD to make a wider class of operations easier to implement efficiently;
- Can simply encapsulate EVM verification, rather than the entire concept of rollups.