Ethereum (ETH) Co-founder Vitalik Buterin Proposes Replacing the EVM With RISC-V Architecture to Boost Scalability

Ethereum's co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has proposed new architecture and protocol-wide standards to make the chain simpler, faster, and easier to maintain

In a recent blog post, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, shared his thoughts on simplifying the chain's architecture and protocol-wide standards. Drawing inspiration from Bitcoin's minimalist design, Buterin suggested new protocols and architecture that could transform the blockchain over the next five years.

"One of the best things about Bitcoin is how beautifully simple the protocol is," Buterin began, explaining in detail how Bitcoin transactions and proofs work.

According to Buterin, keeping the protocol simple brings benefits that are key to making it "a credibly neutral and globally trusted base layer."

"The protocol does not try to do too much. It stays focused on doing a small number of critical things well. In the case of Bitcoin, that small set of critical things are transferring value and verifying the transaction history."

However, Buterin noted that in the pursuit of adding new capabilities, such as PoS and zk-SNARKs, Ethereum has become "more and more complex."

"Technical complexity translates into opportunity cost: time that could be spent working on something else, and in the case of a protocol, that opportunity cost is measured in the units of what other chains and protocols could be built if there was less time spent on making one chain do everything."

He went on to add that technical complexity also brings higher development costs and a greater chance of bugs.

"Historically, Ethereum has often not done this (sometimes because of my own decisions), and this has contributed to much of our excessive development expenditure, all kinds of security risk, and insularity of R&D culture, often in pursuit of benefits that have proven illusory."

Buterin stated that the benefits of simplifying the protocol and architecture “do not appear immediately” in the short term. But, “in the long term, it will be worth it.”

Replacing EVM With RISC-V To Boost Scalability

Buterin is suggesting boosting Ethereum's scalability by swapping the current EVM bytecode for RISC-V as the virtual machine language of smart contracts. The transition to RISC-V would see an open-source instruction set architecture defining how software communicates with processors using a minimalist design philosophy.

For Ethereum, the proposed radical change would enable the chain to run faster by removing extra translation steps.

Moreover, applications could work directly on the execution layer, potentially making some operations up to 100 times faster and slashing on-chain execution costs by as much as 100X while keeping existing smart contracts working.

In the near term, Ethereum is due to undergo its Pectra upgrade on May 7, which will enhance user experience, increase rollup scalability, and boost the upper limit for validator stakes.