Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is once again thinking long-term, and this time, he’s proposing something pretty radical: replacing Ethereum’s core execution engine, the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), with RISC-V, an open-source processor architecture.
In a new post on the Ethereum Magicians forum, Buterin laid out why this switch could be a game-changer. He believes the execution layer — basically, the part of Ethereum that runs smart contracts — is one of the network’s biggest scaling bottlenecks. And the only way to fix it? Start fresh.
He’s not talking about scrapping everything. The basic smart contract features developers use today, like accounts, storage, and cross-contract calls, would stay the same.
The real shift would be under the hood: opcodes like SLOAD and CALL would become syscalls in a RISC-V system. And instead of compiling Solidity or Vyper code to EVM bytecode, they’d compile to RISC-V.
Why RISC-V? Because zero-knowledge (ZK) provers — the cryptographic tools used to scale Ethereum — are currently forced to simulate the EVM by translating it into RISC-V anyway.
Buterin thinks giving developers direct access to RISC-V, rather than routing everything through the EVM, could cut out a lot of unnecessary complexity. In some cases, this could make things over 100 times more efficient.
The best part is that it won’t break anything that already exists. All current EVM smart contracts would keep working and would still be able to talk to the new RISC-V-based contracts. And devs won’t need to give up Solidity — the tooling would just adapt under the hood.
As for rolling this out, there are a couple of ways it could happen. One idea is to support both EVM and RISC-V contracts at the same time. Another is to run older EVM contracts through a RISC-V-powered interpreter, so they keep working seamlessly on the new system. A third idea is to make virtual machine interpreters a core part of the protocol, so developers could even use other VMs like Move in the future.
Buterin also pointed to Nervos and Polkadot as examples of projects already experimenting with RISC-V. Ethereum would be a bigger leap, but the benefits could be huge, especially in terms of simplifying the execution layer, which has gotten increasingly messy over time.
While this RISC-V idea is very much long-term, Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Pectra, is much closer, set to go live on May 7. That’ll focus on rollup scaling, user experience, and validator stake limits.
But down the line, if Buterin’s vision plays out, Ethereum could be running on a whole new virtual machine — one built for the future.
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