Vitalik Buterin has suggested A long-term revision to the Ethereum implementing environment to replace the virtual Ethereum machine with RISC-V, a standardized and expandable instruction set architecture.
The proposal, shared in the Ethereum Magicians Forum on April 20, outlines a multiple-phase shift to improve the evidence of efficiency and simplify the implementation layer, without changing core abstractions such as accounts, storage or cross-contract calls.
The change would retain firmness and vyper as primary developmental languages, which would be adjusted to compilation to RISC-V.
Per Buterin, although writing contracts in rust would be technically possible, readability problems and familiarity with the developer with existing languages would suggest that Roest will not replace the reliability with the application layer. Existing EVM contracts would continue to work and interact with new RISC-V-based contracts, thereby retaining backward compatibility.
Implementation of bottlenecks and long -term scaling
Buterin identified version as one of the last long -term bottlenecks in Ethereum, after problems in the short term are limited by EIPs such as delayed version, access lists at block level and distributed historical storage.
In particular, he pointed to the evidence of costs in ZK-EVMs as the most important limitation for future scalability. Analysis of the ZK-EVM of briefness indicates that only block version is almost half of all speaking cycles, while the rest is consumed by witness data handling and state tree activities.
Although the State-related overhead can be reduced by shifting from Keccak-based Patricia trees to binary trees with hash functions optimized by Provernon, such as Poseidon, the efficiency of the block version limitation remains unless the EVM is tackled immediately.
Buterin noted that ZK-EVMS is already compiling to RISC-V under the hood, which suggests that exposing RISC-V if the primary VM could eliminate a low abstraction and yield efficiency distances. Some test scenarios reportedly show 100x improvements in the Prover performance by completely bypassing the EVM translation.
Coexistence, migration and simplification paths
Multiple implementation paths are being considered. The most conservative would make double support possible for both EVM and RISC-V contracts, maintaining interoperable calls and shared access to persistent condition. EVM contracts would continue to function and can be called by RISC-V contracts or are called through system calls that have been assigned to traditional OPCODES such as Call, Sload and Sstore.
A more aggressive approach includes transforming existing EVM contracts into wrappers who delegate the implementation to an EVM-Tolk written in RISC-V. According to this model, the Bytecode of a contract would be replaced by logic that calls calls and implementation parameters to a designated RISC-V-Tolk contract, receives the return value and forward them to the caller.
An intervening strategy proposes support at the protocol level for virtual machine-interpreters, the recording of this delegation process and making multiple implementation formats possible. Although EVM would be the first VM to be supported under this model, others, including Move, could be added in the future.
Each approach tries to balance compatibility with long -term simplification. According to Buterin, incremental simplifications for the EVM, such as the removal of self -destruction, have proven to be difficult due to complex border cases and legacy behavior.
A complete transition to RISC-V can enable a more maintainable basic layer with minimal implementation logic, similar to compactness with projects such as Tinygrad that enforce strict code baselimites.
Wider design philosophy and alignment with jet chain
The proposal fits in with continuous efforts such as the Beam Chain Initiative, which aims to simplify the consensus mechanism of Ethereum. The RISC-V plan would bring parallel improvements to the implementation layer, allowing the network modularity to strive and reduce complexity in both domains.
As posted on Ethereum magicians, Buterin characterized the proposal as a radical but possibly necessary step towards the realization of long-term L1 efficiency and simplicity. While active EIPs and statelessness frameworks treat scalability improvements in the short and medium term, the future of Ethereum can depend on architectural changes in this size as a performance and sustainable protocol.
No timeline has been announced for an implementation phase. The Ethereum community is expected to take on further discussion to evaluate considerations, the impact of the tools and the migration paths of developers as part of a longer consultation cycle.
The proposal remains exploratory and is intended to open a broader conversation about the direction of the Ethereum implementing environment in the coming years.
Community Response
Some members of the community have increased strategic and technical objections in response to Buterin’s proposal. Adam Cochran doubted the prioritization of L1 efficiency on potential costs of L2 enablement, which suggests that strengthening RISC-V could limit the modular route map of Ethereum.
He emphasizes alternative proposals such as recursive proof aggregation, stateless commitment roots and BLS signature unification, which could possibly offer broader systemic profit with fewer implementation costs.
Others, including Ben A Adams, co-founder and CTO of Illyriad games, and LEVS57, a web3 developer, pointed on performance operations, in particular around hardware compatibility and the continuing role of Promompiles.
Concern included the difficulty to optimize RISC-V instructions at a low level in efficient 256-bit operations and doubts about whether current ZK-RISC-V systems are sufficiently mature or auditable to justify a fundamental shift.
Buterin reacted by trivializing the extent to which the 256-bit word size of the EVM limits the performance, which states that most values are smaller in practice, usually U32, U128, which can efficiently assign compilers to RISC-V instructions.
He repeated that today’s ZK-EVMs are already working as RISC-V environments that enclose an EVM-Tolk, so that direct exposure of RISC-V is a way to remove superfluous layers. While he recognizes stack management and jumps as potential friction points, he claimed that eliminating interpretative overhead remains a net profit.