Vitalik Buterin has published a long‑term execution-layer proposal arguing that Ethereum should replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode with the RISC‑V instruction set as the base virtual machine for L1 smart contracts. The core idea is to keep Ethereum’s existing high-level model—accounts, storage, contract calls—while changing how contract code is represented and executed: languages like Solidity would compile to RISC‑V instead of EVM, and many current EVM opcodes (such as SLOAD or CALL) would become system calls exposed to this new VM. Buterin frames the move as a “radical” but coherent counterpart to the beam chain work on the consensus layer, aimed at fixing what he calls one of Ethereum’s main remaining scaling bottlenecks. The motivation is twofold: simplicity of the execution layer and large scalability gains, especially for zero‑knowledge (ZK) proving. Today, most ZK rollups and provers simulate the EVM by first translating it into RISC‑V or another low-level ISA, adding complexity and overhead. By adopting RISC‑V directly, Buterin argues Ethereum could cut out this translation, potentially improving ZK proving efficiency by 50–100x and making the base layer more prover‑friendly. He outlines multiple migration paths to preserve backward compatibility, from a dual‑VM world where both EVM and RISC‑V contracts coexist and can call each other, to a more aggressive approach where old EVM contracts are transparently run through an on‑chain EVM interpreter written in RISC‑V. While only an exploratory, long‑horizon proposal at this stage, it signals an openness within Ethereum’s research community to replacing the long‑standing EVM with a general‑purpose, open instruction set architecture to keep L1 competitive and easier to scale.

AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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