Bankless: Vitalik’s Virtual Machine Proposal

Author: Jack Inabinet Source: Bankless Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

Vitalik has some bold new ideas for the future of Ethereum.

With Ethereum’s Ethereum gas prices falling to record lows, and computational fees being a fraction of a “gwei”, L1 transactions now only require a few cents to complete. As a result, many on-chain users have begun to question why they left L1 in the first place, and the price of ETH is far inferior to its competitors, people have unprecedented doubts about the feasibility of the “Rollup-centric” roadmap.

In recent days, Ethereum leadership has begun to express support for a strategic shift to refocus development efforts on L1. Riding on this momentum, over the weekend, Vitalik proposed a radical solution to achieve base layer scalability: abandon EVM!

Today, we’ll explore how switching to RISC-V could help Ethereum reclaim its crown as cryptocurrency’s leading smart contract platform.

What did Vitalik propose?

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin hopes to increase transaction speeds and reduce costs on Ethereum’s L1 by replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V, thereby changing the virtual machine language used to write smart contracts.

While a complete redesign of Ethereum’s smart contract logic is undoubtedly radical, according to Buterin’s blog post on the Ethereum Magicians forum, the changes will address existing L1 scalability issues by eliminating unnecessary computations while maintaining backward compatibility with legacy EVM programs.

Vitalik’s proposal echoes Justin Drake’s “Beam Chain” vision of simplifying Ethereum consensus, and just as Beam Chain seeks to simplify Ethereum consensus, the RISC-V execution layer will simplify and scale execution, potentially delivering a 100x efficiency improvement.

Learn about Ethereum Beam Chain on BanklessThe consensus layer upgrade proposed by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake has big implications.

What is RISC-V?

RISC-V (pronounced “risk five”) is an open-source “reduced instruction set computer” (RISC) architecture that serves as a modular blueprint for building virtual machines.

Somewhat like the Linux operating system for computer hardware, RISC-V has been integrated by a number of top chip manufacturing companies, including Intel and Arm, as the preferred programming backbone for their CPUs.

When used in the context of blockchain-based virtual machines, RISC-V is considered to have many advantages over EVM, such as:

• Better zero-knowledge proof performance

• Superior support for existing code compilers and tools

• Generic backend that can support alternative coding languages, such as Solana's Rust and Sui's MOVE

Why abandon EVM?

The EVM has served Ethereum faithfully since the network’s inception, but it has become a cumbersome bottleneck to recent scaling ambitions. A radical overhaul may be needed before L1 can be future-proofed with zero-knowledge proofs…

Many ZK-EVMs in production (e.g. Polygon Miden, Succinct SP1, Risc Zero RISC0) already compile EVM bytecode to RISC-V under the hood; giving developers direct access to that standard will bring benefits by further reducing proof times and enhancing the flexibility of the coding language.

In addition, removing entrenched EVM technical debt, such as the smart contract deletion function “SELFDESTRUCT”, may require switching to a new virtual machine.

Implementing a backend that supports zero-knowledge proofs seems to be the best solution to simplify Ethereum's execution layer, and combined with the ability to support more coding languages, the switch to RISC-V is expected to be a paradigm shift that establishes Ethereum as the clear leader in the next generation of blockchain technology.