$ETH Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has presented a revolutionary proposal to replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V architecture, a widely used open-source standard in hardware. The goal: to solve scalability bottlenecks and optimize the generation of zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), key to the future of blockchain.

Why change the EVM?

The EVM, the "engine" that executes smart contracts on Ethereum, has accumulated complexity after years of updates.

Generation of ZK proofs: Currently, ZK-EVMs translate the EVM bytecode to RISC-V, an intermediate step that consumes time and resources.

Operational costs: Processes such as data deserialization and state root calculations account for up to 50% of block execution time.

"By compiling directly to RISC-V, we could accelerate ZK proofs by up to 100 times in some cases," Buterin explained in the Ethereum Magicians forum.