Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin introduced a proposal that could significantly transform the execution layer of the world’s second-largest blockchain by replacing the current Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V—an open-standard instruction set architecture.
Buterin’s Proposal
In a blog post published on April 20, 3035, Buterin suggested a major overhaul of Ethereum’s execution layer to improve efficiency and resolve key scaling bottlenecks.
- He contended that, in the long run, the change would tackle at least two major bottlenecks affecting Ethereum’s Layer 1 scalability: sustaining competitive block production and advancing zero-knowledge (zk-EVM) functionality.
- Buterin also discussed how most prover time is spent on tasks tied to witness size and block execution.
- He then suggested major efficiency gains—up to 100x—by replacing Ethereum’s current state tree with a binary tree using faster hashes and by letting developers access the RISC-V VM directly.
“In practice, I expect that the remaining prover time will become dominated by what today are precompiles. If we make RISC-V the primary VM, then the gas schedule will reflect proving times, and so there will be economic pressure to stop using more expensive precompiles; but even still the gains won’t be quite this impressive, but we have good reason to believe they will be very significant.”
Vitalik Buterin, Co-Founder, Ethereum
Implementation
According to Buterin, there are several ways to implement the RISC-V proposal. The simplest one is to run both EVM and RISC-V virtual machines in parallel, allowing contracts in either to use the same features—storage, ETH balances, calls—and interact with each other.
- On the other hand, a more radical option is to convert existing EVM contracts into wrappers that forward calls to an EVM interpreter written in RISC-V, the Ethereum developer presented.
- This interpreter would execute the original EVM code and return the result, effectively running all EVM logic within the RISC-V environment.
- In addition, Buterin noted an intermediate approach: to formalize the interpreter idea by making “virtual machine interpreters” a built-in protocol feature, with the EVM as the first and written in RISC-V. Other VMs, like Move, could be added later.
In response to the proposal, members of the Ethereum community acknowledged that it could speed up and simplify ZK proving by avoiding the complexities of EVM execution. However, most expressed concerns, suggesting that the plan may not be a good direction overall.
Ben Adams, an Ethereum developer and the co-founder of free-to-play real-time strategy MMO game Illyriad Games, raised concern, noting that using a low-level CPU architecture like RISC-V for Ethereum’s VM could hurt performance on common hardware.
- He pointed out that re-optimizing this back on mainstream CPUs like AMD or ARM is very difficult, even for advanced compilers
“The risk here is that ZK-proving may get better, but blockbuilding and execution will deteriorate significantly.”
Ben Adams, Co-Founder, Illyriad Games
Crypto investor Adam Cochran also commented, stating that while he agrees that simplifying Ethereum’s execution layer using RISC-V has merit—especially for improving L1 performance—he questions whether that should be Ethereum’s top priority right now.
- He suggested there may be better alternatives that benefit both Ethereum’s L1 and L2,s like danksharding, recursive proof aggregation, and unified cryptographic standards, without such a high technical cost.
Another comment presented was from Daniel Marin, who noted that virtualizing the EVM using RISC-V could be a good interim step, but it is far from optimal for verifiable computation since RISC-V was not designed for that purpose.
- Despite these hurdles, Marin wrote that the proposal is worth pursuing—as teams like Nexus are already doing—but true scalability and maintainability will require better ISAs tailored for ZK computation and carefully verified compiler correctness.
This article is published on BitPinas: Vitalik Buterin Proposes Replacing Ethereum’s EVM with RISC-V to Boost Layer 1 Scalability
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