Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, recently proposed a significant overhaul to Ethereum’s execution environment. The proposal suggests replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine with RISC-V, a standardized and extensible instruction set architecture. This change aims to improve proving efficiency and simplify the execution layer without altering core abstractions like accounts, storage, or cross-contract calls.
According to Buterin, this shift would not affect the primary development languages used on the Ethereum platform, such as Solidity and Vyper. Instead, these languages would be adapted to compile to RISC-V. While it would be technically possible to write contracts directly in Rust, Buterin believes that readability concerns and developer familiarity with existing languages make it unlikely that Rust will replace Solidity at the application layer. Existing EVM contracts would still be operational and could interact fully with new RISC-V-based contracts, ensuring backward compatibility.
Buterin identified execution as one of Ethereum’s final long-term bottlenecks, even after addressing near-term issues with EIPs. He highlighted proving costs in ZK-EVMs as a key constraint for future scalability. By shifting to RISC-V as the primary VM, the proposal aims to eliminate a layer of abstraction and potentially improve efficiency. Some test scenarios have reportedly shown significant performance improvements by bypassing EVM translation altogether.
The proposal outlines multiple implementation pathways, including conservative and aggressive approaches to coexisting EVM and RISC-V contracts. Each approach seeks to balance compatibility with long-term simplification, aiming to create a more maintainable base layer with minimal execution logic.
The proposal aligns with initiatives like the beam chain, which aims to simplify Ethereum’s consensus mechanism. By introducing improvements to the execution layer, Ethereum could pursue modularity and reduced complexity across different domains.
While some community members have raised strategic and technical reservations about the proposal, Buterin has responded by emphasizing the potential benefits of direct exposure to RISC-V and the removal of redundant layers in the execution process. The Ethereum community is expected to engage in further discussions to evaluate trade-offs and potential migration paths as part of a longer deliberation cycle.
Overall, Buterin’s proposal represents a radical but possibly necessary step towards realizing long-term efficiency and simplicity in Ethereum’s execution environment. The community will continue to explore the implications and feasibility of this proposed overhaul in the coming years.