Vitalik Buterin proposes a 5-year plan to replace Ethereum’s EVM with RISC-V.
Aiming for simplicity like Bitcoin.
The change could boost efficiency by up to 100x, addressing Ethereum’s scalability issues.
It involves compiling smart contracts to RISC-V, maintaining core functions but improving execution.
Ethereum’s transaction fees hit $0.16 in April 2025, highlighting the need for this upgrade.
The proposal aligns with the Ethereum Foundation’s focus on Layer 1 scaling, but faces developer adaptation challenges.
Vitalik Buterin’s latest proposal to revolutionize Ethereum by replacing its Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with a RISC-V architecture. This move, part of a proposed 5-year plan, aims to make Ethereum as “beautifully simple” as Bitcoin while tackling its scalability and efficiency challenges.
Vitalik´s post Background and Proposal Details
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, shared this radical idea in late April 2025, detailed in a post on the Ethereum Magicians forum. The proposal suggests replacing the EVM, the core engine that executes smart contracts, with RISC-V, an open-source instruction set architecture known for its flexibility and widespread hardware adoption.
The plan involves compiling smart contract languages like Solidity directly to RISC-V instead of EVM bytecode. This means operations like SLOAD (storage load) and CALL (contract calls), currently opcodes in the EVM, would become system calls (syscalls) in a RISC-V system, potentially streamlining the process. Crucially, Buterin emphasizes maintaining backward compatibility with existing EVM contracts, ensuring the core functions—accounts, storage, and cross-contract calls—remain intact.
Motivation: Addressing Ethereum’s Challenges
The timing of this proposal is no coincidence. Ethereum has faced increasing competition from next-generation blockchains like Solana and Sui, which offer faster transactions and lower fees. This has led to a noticeable decline in base-layer activity, with many users and developers migrating to layer-2 solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism.
Recent data underscores this shift: in April 2025, Ethereum’s average transaction fee dropped to $0.16, the lowest since 2020, according to YCharts. While low fees benefit users, they also mean reduced network revenue, raising concerns about long-term sustainability.
Buterin’s proposal aims to address these scalability bottlenecks by improving the efficiency of the execution layer, potentially attracting more activity back to Ethereum’s base layer. He argues that the current EVM is a significant hurdle, and only a “radical change” like adopting RISC-V can deliver the necessary gains, with estimates suggesting up to 100x efficiency improvements in some cases.
Potential Benefits and Technical Implications
The benefits of switching to RISC-V are substantial. As an open-source architecture, RISC-V is royalty-free and widely used in hardware, which could lead to better hardware support and innovation within the Ethereum ecosystem. This could reduce on-chain execution costs, making Ethereum more competitive with rivals and potentially lowering the barrier for developers and users.
The efficiency gains of up to 100x, as claimed by Buterin, could revolutionize transaction speeds and costs, addressing one of Ethereum’s primary scaling issues. This is particularly crucial given the network’s recent performance, with blob fees dropping to 3.18 ETH (around $5,000) in the week of March 30, 2025, and transaction fees hitting historic lows.
However, the technical implementation is complex. The transition would require developers to adapt their tools and workflows, compiling smart contracts to RISC-V rather than EVM bytecode. While Buterin assures backward compatibility, ensuring seamless integration with the vast ecosystem of decentralized applications (dApps) will be a significant challenge.
Comparative Analysis: Ethereum vs. Bitcoin Simplicity
Buterin’s goal of making Ethereum as “beautifully simple” as Bitcoin is ambitious. Bitcoin’s simplicity lies in its focus on being a decentralized store of value, with a straightforward consensus mechanism and limited smart contract capabilities.
Ethereum, on the other hand, is a platform for decentralized applications, requiring a more complex execution layer. The RISC-V proposal aims to bridge this gap by simplifying the underlying architecture, potentially reducing the cognitive load on developers and improving user experience.
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