Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, proposed a multi-phase strategy aimed at improving long-term execution efficiency and scalability for Ethereum by replacing EVM with RISC-V architecture.
Solidity and Vyper Stay, Rust Optional
In Buterin's vision, Solidity and Vyper would remain the dominant programming languages, adapted to compile directly to RISC-V instructions. Although Rust-based contract writing could be feasible, Buterin believes that developer familiarity makes Solidity a more practical choice.
Addressing Ethereum's Execution Bottleneck
Buterin noted that execution is shaping up to be Ethereum's last long-term bottleneck. This is especially important considering other scalability improvements, including delayed execution and block-level access lists. The main pain point lies in the costs of ZK-EVM proving, as recent analysis indicates that block execution consumes nearly 50% of total prover cycles in ZK rollups.
Potential of RISC-V in ZK-EVM
Buterin emphasized that ZK-EVMs already compile to RISC-V at a lower level. Exposing RISC-V directly as Ethereum's virtual machine could significantly reduce translation overhead. Some tests suggest this could yield up to 100x improvements in prover performance. 'We should think in decades,' Buterin wrote.
If adopted, this proposal could mark one of Ethereum's most transformative infrastructure upgrades, bridging today's high-level developer tools with next-gen zero-knowledge performance.
