Vitalik Buterin has proposed a long-term overhaul to Ethereum’s execution surroundings to interchange the Ethereum Digital Machine with RISC-V, a standardized and extensible instruction set structure.
The proposal, shared within the Ethereum Magicians discussion board on April 20, outlines a multi-phase shift to enhance proving effectivity and simplify the execution layer, with out altering core abstractions like accounts, storage, or cross-contract calls.
The change would retain Solidity and Vyper as major improvement languages, which might be tailored to compile to RISC-V.
Per Buterin, whereas writing contracts immediately in Rust can be technically potential, readability issues and developer familiarity with current languages recommend that Rust is not going to change Solidity on the utility layer. Present EVM contracts would proceed to function and work together absolutely with new RISC-V-based contracts, preserving backward compatibility.
Execution bottlenecks and long-term scaling
Buterin recognized execution as one in every of Ethereum’s remaining long-term bottlenecks, after near-term points are mitigated by EIPs resembling delayed execution, block-level entry lists, and distributed historic storage.
Specifically, he pointed to proving prices in ZK-EVMs as the important thing constraint for future scalability. Evaluation from Succinct’s ZK-EVM signifies that block execution alone accounts for almost half of all prover cycles, whereas the rest is consumed by witness knowledge dealing with and state tree operations.
Whereas state-related overhead will be decreased by shifting from Keccak-based Patricia bushes to binary bushes with prover-optimized hash features resembling Poseidon, block execution effectivity will stay limiting until the EVM is addressed immediately.
Buterin famous that ZK-EVMs already compile to RISC-V underneath the hood, suggesting that exposing RISC-V as the first VM may remove a layer of abstraction and yield effectivity positive factors. Some check situations reportedly present 100x enhancements in prover efficiency by bypassing EVM translation altogether.
Coexistence, migration, and simplification paths
A number of implementation pathways are into consideration. Probably the most conservative would permit twin help for each EVM and RISC-V contracts, sustaining interoperable calls and shared entry to persistent state. EVM contracts would proceed to operate and will name into or be known as by RISC-V contracts by way of system calls mapped to conventional opcodes resembling CALL, SLOAD, and SSTORE.
A extra aggressive strategy entails reworking current EVM contracts into wrappers that delegate execution to an EVM interpreter written in RISC-V. Underneath this mannequin, a contract’s bytecode would get replaced with logic that routes calls and execution parameters to a chosen RISC-V interpreter contract, receives the return worth, and forwards it to the caller.
An intermediate technique proposes protocol-level help for digital machine interpreters, enshrining this delegation course of and enabling a number of execution codecs to coexist. Whereas EVM can be the primary VM supported underneath this mannequin, others, together with Transfer, may very well be added sooner or later.
Every strategy seeks to steadiness compatibility with long-term simplification. In line with Buterin, incremental simplifications to the EVM, resembling eradicating SELFDESTRUCT, have confirmed tough because of complicated edge circumstances and legacy behaviors.
An entire transition to RISC-V may allow a extra maintainable base layer with minimal execution logic, comparable in compactness to tasks like Tinygrad that implement strict codebase limits.
Broader design philosophy and alignment with Beam Chain
The proposal aligns with ongoing efforts just like the beam chain initiative, which goals to simplify Ethereum’s consensus mechanism. The RISC-V plan would convey parallel enhancements to the execution layer, enabling the community to pursue modularity and decreased complexity throughout each domains.
As posted on Ethereum Magicians, Buterin characterised the proposal as a radical however probably obligatory step towards realizing long-term L1 effectivity and ease. Whereas lively EIPs and statelessness frameworks deal with short- and medium-term scalability enhancements, Ethereum’s future as a performant and sustainable protocol might hinge on architectural modifications of this magnitude.
No timeline has been introduced for any implementation part. The Ethereum neighborhood is anticipated to interact in additional dialogue to guage trade-offs, tooling impression, and developer migration paths as a part of an extended deliberation cycle.
The proposal stays exploratory and is meant to open a broader dialog concerning the course of Ethereum’s execution surroundings over the approaching years.
Group response
Some neighborhood members raised strategic and technical reservations in response to Buterin’s proposal. Adam Cochran questioned the prioritization of L1 effectivity on the potential expense of L2 enablement, suggesting that enshrining RISC-V may slim Ethereum’s modular roadmap.
He highlighted various proposals resembling recursive proof aggregation, stateless dedication roots, and BLS signature unification, which may probably provide broader systemic positive factors with fewer implementation prices.
Others, together with Ben A Adams, Co-founder and CTO of Illyriad Video games, and levs57, a web3 developer, pointed to efficiency trade-offs, notably round {hardware} compatibility and the persistent position of precompiles.
Considerations included the problem of optimizing low-level RISC-V directions again into environment friendly 256-bit operations and doubts about whether or not present zk-RISC-V techniques are sufficiently mature or auditable to justify a foundational shift.
Buterin responded by downplaying the extent to which the EVM’s 256-bit phrase dimension constrains execution, stating that the majority values in follow are smaller, usually u32, u64, or u128, which compilers can effectively map to RISC-V directions.
He reiterated that right now’s ZK-EVMs already function as RISC-V environments embedding an EVM interpreter, framing direct publicity of RISC-V as a solution to take away redundant layers. Whereas acknowledging stack administration and jumps as potential friction factors, he maintained that eliminating interpretive overhead stays a internet achieve.
