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Just over a year after the Dencun upgrade gave Layer 2 networks a massive boost, and only months before the much-anticipated Fusaka release, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin floated a bold proposal. In an April forum post, he suggested the network could eventually replace its longtime workhorse, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), with RISC-V, a low-level, open-source instruction set architecture. The Allure of a New Foundation For those unfamiliar, the EVM is the execution engine powering every smart contract on Ethereum. It translates Solidity code into machine-level instructions and governs how contracts interact. It’s been the backbone of Ethereum since its inception. So when Buterin brought up the idea of swapping it out, it sent ripples through the community. His reasoning is rooted in long-term scalability: “The beam chain effort holds great promise for simplifying the consensus layer,” he wrote. “But for the execution layer to see similar gains, this kind of radical change may be the only viable path.” Buterin argued that a RISC-V-based virtual machine could drastically speed up zero-knowledge proof generation by up to 100 times. This could be a game-changer for zk-rollups, which are seen as Ethereum’s best shot at scaling securely. By removing the need to translate code twice, from Solidity to EVM, and then to zk-friendly formats, RISC-V could streamline proof generation and reduce computational costs. However, it’s one thing to float an idea, and it’s another to overhaul the very heart of the Ethereum ecosystem. Stuart Popejoy, co-founder and CEO of proof-of-work Layer 1 blockchain Kadena, was blunt about the scale of disruption: “There’s no future in which there’s a large short-term disruption because it couldn’t possibly happen fast,” he told CryptoPotato. “A ‘better’ system would have to run in parallel for years as well as accumulate the network effects the EVM has.” Popejoy,…

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Filed under: News - @ August 3, 2025 4:29 pm