Vitalik Buterin has introduced a proposal to fundamentally rework Ethereum’s execution environment by transitioning from the current Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to RISC-V, a modular and extensible instruction set architecture.
Published on April 20 in the Ethereum Magicians forum, the proposal outlines a multi-phase strategy to improve long-term proving efficiency and simplify ETH’s execution layer—all while maintaining core abstractions like accounts, storage, and contract calls.
Solidity and Vyper Stay, Rust Optional
In Buterin’s vision, Solidity and Vyper would remain the dominant smart contract languages, adapted to compile directly to RISC-V instructions. Although Rust-based contract writing could be technically feasible, Buterin argues that developer familiarity and readability concerns make Solidity the more practical choice at the application layer.
Importantly, the upgrade would preserve full backward compatibility. Existing EVM-based contracts would continue to function and interact seamlessly with contracts compiled to RISC-V, ensuring a smooth transition across the network.
Addressing Ethereum’s Final Bottleneck
According to Buterin, execution is shaping up to be Ethereum’s last long-term bottleneck, especially as other scalability improvements are handled through upgrades like:
- Delayed execution (EIP-7523)
- Block-level access lists (EIP-7694)
- Distributed historical storage (EIP-4444)
The main pain point is in ZK-EVM proving costs. Recent analysis from Succinct Labs shows that block execution consumes nearly 50% of total prover cycles in ZK rollups. While efforts are underway to reduce state tree overhead by moving from Keccak-based Merkle-Patricia tries to binary trees with hash functions like Poseidon, execution remains the dominant constraint.
RISC-V Already Powering ZK-EVMs Under the Hood
Buterin emphasized that ZK-EVMs already compile to RISC-V at a lower level, and exposing RISC-V directly as Ethereum’s virtual machine could remove a major translation overhead. Some tests suggest this could yield up to 100x improvements in prover performance.
“We should think in decades,” Buterin wrote. “Making Ethereum’s execution layer future-proof is a step worth taking.”
If adopted, this proposal could mark one of Ethereum’s most transformative infrastructure upgrades yet—bridging today’s high-level developer tools with next-gen zero-knowledge performance.
Kosta Gushterov
Reporter at Coindoo
Kosta has been a part of the team since 2021 and has solidified his position with a thirst for knowledge, incredible dedication to his work and a “detective-like” mindset. He not only covers a wide range of trending topics, he also creates reviews, PR articles and educational content. His work has also been referenced by other news outlets.
Source: https://coindoo.com/vitalik-buterin-proposes-replacing-evm-with-risc-v-to-boost-ethereum-scalability/