Vitalik Buterin recently proposed a significant overhaul to Ethereum’s execution environment, suggesting a shift from the Ethereum Virtual Machine to RISC-V. This change aims to improve proving efficiency and simplify the execution layer without altering core abstractions. The proposal retains languages like Solidity and Vyper while allowing them to compile to RISC-V. Buterin believes that while writing contracts in Rust is technically possible, existing languages like Solidity will not be replaced at the application layer due to readability concerns and developer familiarity.
Execution has been identified as one of Ethereum’s final long-term bottlenecks, with proving costs in ZK-EVMs being a key constraint for future scalability. Buterin highlighted that block execution accounts for a significant portion of prover cycles and that efficiency gains could be achieved by directly addressing the EVM. Some test scenarios have shown 100x improvements in prover performance by bypassing EVM translation altogether, suggesting that exposing RISC-V as the primary VM could yield efficiency gains.
Multiple implementation pathways are being considered to facilitate the coexistence and migration of EVM and RISC-V contracts. These pathways range from conservative approaches that maintain dual support for both contract types to more aggressive strategies that involve transforming existing EVM contracts into wrappers that delegate execution to a RISC-V interpreter. Each approach aims to balance compatibility with long-term simplification, with the goal of enabling a more maintainable base layer with minimal execution logic.
The proposal aligns with ongoing efforts like the beam chain initiative, which seeks to simplify Ethereum’s consensus mechanism. By introducing RISC-V as the primary VM, the network could pursue modularity and reduced complexity across both consensus and execution domains. While the proposal is described as radical, it is seen as a potentially necessary step towards achieving long-term efficiency and simplicity on Layer 1 of the Ethereum network. Discussions within the Ethereum community are expected to continue to evaluate the trade-offs and impact of such architectural changes.
The community response to Buterin’s proposal has been mixed, with some members raising strategic and technical reservations. Concerns have been raised about the potential narrowing of Ethereum’s modular roadmap, performance trade-offs, and the maturity of current zk-RISC-V systems to justify a foundational shift. Buterin has responded by downplaying the constraints of the EVM’s 256-bit word size on execution and highlighting the existing operation of ZK-EVMs as RISC-V environments. The proposal remains exploratory, and further discussions are expected to evaluate the direction of Ethereum’s execution environment in the coming years.
