"Radical" proposal from Vitalik Buterin for Ethereum

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin presented a proposal he described as "radical" for Ethereum at the forum called Ethereum Magicians, where developers and community members discuss technical issues.

Buterin suggests that the bytecode interpreted by the (Ethereum Virtual Machine – EVM), which represents the compiled form of smart contracts and resembles machine code that the EVM can understand, needs to be modified with an open-source RISC-V architecture.

Buterin stated, "Beam chain studies have great potential to greatly simplify Ethereum's consensus ( settlement) layer, but for the execution layer's ( network to carry out transactions, run smart contracts, and manage the current state of the account) to undergo similar improvements, such a radical change may be the only feasible way."

"Costs can decrease by up to 99%"

Buterin argues that in order to enhance the performance of Ethereum's execution layer, the EVM's proving process needs to be made more efficient. According to the founder of Ethereum, the RISC-V architecture can reduce execution costs on-chain in certain situations by up to the fees paid for executing transactions on the blockchain and the amount of resources used 99%.

There are blockchain projects that currently use or experiment with the RISC-V architecture proposed by Buterin. As mentioned in Buterin's article, Nervos (CKB) is one of them. The other is PolkaVM, introduced in the Polkadot ecosystem in 2023. Additionally, Nervos is currently the project that has the most concrete integration with RISC-V and actively uses it on the network.

Published: April 21, 2025 10:12