Vitalik Buterin floats swapping Ethereum's EVM for RISC-V to boost scalability

The Block2025/04/19 16:00

By:By Zack Abrams

Quick Take In a new forum post, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposes boosting Ethereum’s scalability by using RISC-V as the virtual machine language of smart contracts, rather than the current EVM bytecode. Buterin said the “radical” and “ambitious” idea could be the “only viable path” for significantly scaling Ethereum’s execution layer.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, in a new blog post on the Ethereum Magicians forum, floated a "radical" long-term proposal for the blockchain network's execution layer: replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine's (EVM) bytecode with the open-source RISC-V architecture. 

"The beam chain effort holds great promise for greatly simplifying the consensus layer of Ethereum," Buterin wrote . "But for the execution layer to see similar gains, this kind of radical change may be the only viable path."

Buterin's post argues that in order to boost performance of Ethereum's execution layer, the network needs to boost the efficiency of the EVM proving process. Adopting RISC-V (pronounced "risk five"), an open-source processing architecture comparable to its proprietary competitors like ARM and x86, could slash on-chain execution costs by as much as 100x in some cases, Buterin argues. 

 

"Old-style EVM contracts will continue to work and will be fully two-way interoperable with new-style RISC-V contracts," Buterin notes. Buterin's proposal considers supporting both EVM and RISC-V contracts as well as creating a dedicated interpreter for converting EVM contracts into a RISC-V equivalent. 

 

Other blockchain projects have experimented with adopting RISC-V, such as PolkaDot's PolkaVM , introduced in August 2023. PolkaDot's approach is similar to Buterin's first proposal, supporting multiple virtual machines rather than converting all existing contracts through a major network hard fork. 

 

In the near term, Ethereum plans to launch its "Pectra" upgrade on mainnet on May 7, improving user experience, boosting rollup scalability, and raising the upper limit for validator stakes. 

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