TechFlow news, May 5 — According to Decrypt, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V in a recent blog post, aiming to enhance blockchain performance and simplify its architecture.
Vitalik stated that this transition could enable Ethereum to achieve simplicity comparable to Bitcoin within five years. Unlike the current EVM, which requires additional translation steps, RISC-V—an open-source instruction set—would allow applications to run directly at the execution layer, potentially speeding up certain operations by 100 times while maintaining compatibility with existing smart contracts.
In addition, the RISC-V architecture would lower the cost of creating new infrastructure, reduce long-term protocol maintenance expenses, decrease the risk of catastrophic vulnerabilities, and minimize social attack surfaces. However, Dominick John, an analyst at Kronos Research, pointed out that the proposal might break backward compatibility and require developers to undergo retraining.
