Vitalik Proposes Replacing EVM With RISC-V to Scale Ethereum

Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has sparked debate within the crypto community following an April 20 blog post on the Ethereum Magicians forum in which he proposed the idea of replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the virtual machine language that Ethereum smart contracts are written in, with RISC-V, an open-source computer program architecture.

According to Buterin, adopting RISC-V would “greatly improve the efficiency of the Ethereum execution layer, resolving one of the primary scaling bottlenecks, and can also greatly improve the execution layer’s simplicity.”

He argues that the change would, in the long term, address at least two key bottlenecks to Ethereum’s Layer 1 (L1) scalability concerns, including maintaining competitive block production and enhancing zero-knowledge (zk-EVM) capabilities.

One possibility, if Buterin's proposal is implemented, is for Ethereum developers to begin writing smart contracts in Rust, the programming language used by Solana.

Buterin’s proposal has drawn mixed reactions from the Ethereum community, with many indicating confusion as to how it would work, while others have suggested it isn’t a great idea.

“Taking a step back, I think it raises the question of what is Ethereum’s priority purpose right now? L1 execution, simplicity, decentralization, or L2 enablement? This would be great for L1 execution, but that lowers the value add of L2s, competing against ourselves, and doesn’t add much value to that roadmap in exchange for a huge technical lift,” said crypto investor Adam Cochran.

Meanwhile, another user, levs57, pushed back hard on the proposal, saying it rests on some shaky assumptions about how proof systems work and what they’re capable of. He pointed out that current zk-EVM implementations already rely heavily on precompiles for anything computationally heavy—hashing, signatures, etc. This could mean switching to RISC-V wouldn’t necessarily really reduce complexity or maintenance.

Addressing community concerns, Ethereum Foundation co-executive director Tomasz K. Stańczak laid out developers’ priorities for Ethereum’s forthcoming upgrades and clarified that Vitalik’s proposals are intended to “start conversations and encourage progress in difficult research areas. Community review may refine them significantly or even reject them.”

How It Could Work

Buterin also discussed possible ways to implement the proposal.

The first, and least chaotic, approach would be to support two virtual machines (VMs) and allow smart contracts to be written using either. Smart contracts are self-executable computer programs typically deployed in blockchain environments.

The second, more radical approach, is to make all existing EVM smart contracts capable of calling an EVM interpreter contract written in RISC-V that runs their existing code. This would allow EVM contracts to interact with the new virtual machine.

The third, and final approach, would be to implement the second approach but create an explicit protocol feature for it. This means that a “virtual machine interpreter” with logic written in RISC-V will become a permanent feature within the virtual machine architecture.