Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin Unveils Ambitious Proposal to Replace EVM with RISC-V

Ethan McErlean at The Block reports that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed an ambitious vision to drastically simplify the cryptocurrency’s protocol over the next five years, making it "close to as simple as Bitcoin."

Buterin's proposal, presented in a May 3 blog post, aims to streamline the second-largest cryptocurrency's protocol, which has become increasingly complex over time.

"One of the best things about Bitcoin is how beautifully simple the protocol is," Buterin wrote, highlighting the benefits of a streamlined approach.

"It's a small number of components that are easy to understand and reason about, and it's largely able to avoid the need for complex tradeoffs."

As part of the changes, Buterin proposed transitioning Ethereum's Virtual Machine (EVM) to RISC-V, an open-source instruction set architecture that defines how software communicates with processors.

This transition could make applications run up to 100 times faster by enabling them to work directly on the execution layer, ensuring compatibility with existing smart contracts.

Currently, smart contracts on Ethereum need to be translated to other formats, creating performance bottlenecks.

"The RISC-V architecture can handle operations directly and is simpler to reason about," Buterin said.

This simplicity could increase participation in protocol research and development.

Buterin also claims that transitioning to RISC-V would decrease "the cost of creating new infrastructure," reduce "long-term protocol maintenance costs," lower the "risk of catastrophic bugs," and minimize the "social attack surface" by having fewer moving parts.

The proposal comes at a time when crypto investors have largely lost interest in Ethereum.

The cryptocurrency has fallen out of favor among traders in recent months, with its market share dropping to an all-time low of 7% in April, according to data from crypto analytics firm Messari.

Its price has been trading in the low $1,800s throughout May, remaining largely unchanged since the start of the year. By comparison, Bitcoin is only down 13% from its peak price earlier this year.

In his blog post, Buterin noted that past failures at improving Ethereum have set back the network.

He added that the network has often not made the right choices, "sometimes because of my own decisions."

"We need to make sure that we choose the simplest possible system that can work, even if it means sacrificing some short-term gains," he concluded.

"Caring about simplicity is, like decentralization, a short-term cost for the sake of benefits that do not appear immediately."