Vitalik Buterin proposed a long-term overhaul of the Ethereum execution environment, replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine with RISC-V, a standardized, extended instruction set architecture.
The proposal, shared on April 20th at the Ethereum Magicians Forum, outlines a multiphase shift to improve empirical efficiency and simplify the execution layer without changing core abstractions such as accounts, storage, and cross-contract calls.
This change preserves solidity and Vyper as the main development language that is adapted to compile to RISC-V.
While it is technically possible to write a rust contract directly on a per-buterin basis, readability concerns and developers familiar with existing languages suggest that Rust will not replace the robustness of the application layer. Existing EVM contracts will continue to fully interact with new RISC-V-based contracts to maintain backward compatibility.
Running Bottlenecks and Long-Term Scaling
Buterin has identified executions as one of Ethereum’s final long-term bottlenecks after EIPs such as execution delays, block-level access lists, and distributed historical storage alleviated short-term issues.
In particular, he pointed out that the costs of ZK-EVMs are proven as a key constraint on future scalability. A brief analysis from ZK-EVM shows that block execution alone accounts for almost half of all playbar cycles, while the rest is consumed by witness data processing and state tree operations.
Although state-related overhead can be reduced by shifting Prover, such as Poseidon, from Keccak-based Patricia trees to binary trees with optimized hashing capabilities, unless EVM is addressed directly, block execution efficiency will continue to be limited.
Buterin suggests that ZK-EVMS already compiled to RISC-V under the hood and exposed RISC-V as the primary VM could eliminate layers of abstraction and yielding efficiency improvements. Some test scenarios reportedly show a 100x improvement in prober performance by completely bypassing EVM translation.
Coexistence, Migration, and Simplified Passes
Multiple implementation routes are under consideration. The most conservatives allow dual support for both EVM and RISC-V contracts, maintaining shared access to interoperable calls and persistent states. EVM contracts continue to function and may be called or invoked by a RISC-V contract via system calls mapped to traditional opcodes such as Call, Sload, Sstore, etc.
A more aggressive approach involves converting existing EVM contracts into wrappers and delegating execution to an EVM interpreter written in RISC-V. In this model, the bytecode of the contract is replaced by logic that routes calls and execution parameters to the specified RISC-V interpreter agreement, receives return values and forwards them to the caller.
The interim strategy proposes protocol-level support for virtual machine interpreters, and embarrasses this delegation process, allowing multiple executables to coexist. EVM is the first VM supported by this model, but other VMs including moves may be added in the future.
Each approach aims to balance compatibility with long-term simplification. According to Buterin, progressive simplifications of EVM, such as the removal of SelfDestruct, have proven difficult due to complex edge cases and legacy behaviors.
A complete migration to RISC-V allows for a more maintainable base layer with minimal execution logic, comparable to projects like TinyGrad, which enforces strict codebase restrictions.
The broader design philosophy and consistency with beam chains
This proposal is consistent with ongoing efforts like the Beam Chain Initiative, which aims to simplify the consensus mechanism of Ethereum. The RISC-V plan provides parallel improvements to the execution layer, allowing the network to pursue modularity and reduce complexity in both domains.
As posted on Ethereum Magicians, Buterin characterized the proposal as an extreme but necessary step to achieving long-term L1 efficiency and simplicity. Active EIP and stateless frameworks address improved scalability in the short and medium term, but the future of Ethereum as a performance-sustainable protocol could depend on architectural changes of this magnitude.
No timeline for the implementation phase has been announced. The Ethereum community is expected to take part in further discussions as part of a longer deliberation cycle to assess trade-offs, tool impacts, and developer migration paths.
The proposal remains exploratory and aims to open up broader conversations about the direction of Ethereum’s execution environment over the next few years.
Community response
Some community members have raised strategic and technical reservations in response to Buterin’s proposal. Adam Cochran questioned the prioritization of L1 efficiency at the potential cost of L2 enablement, suggesting that RISC-V could be used to narrow Ethereum modular roadmap.
He highlighted alternative proposals such as recursive proof aggregation, stateless commitment roots, and BLS signature integration.
Others, including Illyad Games co-founder and CTO Ben A Adams and Web3 developer Levs57, pointed out the trade-off between hardware compatibility and performance, particularly over the persistent role of Prepris.
Concerns included the difficulty of optimizing low-level RISC-V instructions for efficient 256-bit operations, and questions about whether current ZK-RISC-V systems are mature enough to justify underlying changes or auditable.
Buterin responds by neglecting the extent to which the 256-bit word size in EVM constrains execution, saying that most actual values are typically small U32, U64, or U128, allowing the compiler to efficiently map to RISC-V instructions.
He repeated today’s ZK-EVMS already operates as a RISC-V environment that embeds EVM interpreters, and framing the direct exposure of RISC-V as a way to remove redundant layers. While acknowledging stack management and jumps as potential friction points, he argued that eliminating interpretation overhead remains a net profit.
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