Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed replacing Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V, aiming to boost the chain’s performance while making it simpler in the process.
Buterin, in a May 3 blogpost, claimed that through the proposed changes, Ethereum could “become close to as simple as Bitcoin” within five years. “One of the best things about Bitcoin is how beautifully simple the protocol is,” Buterin wrote, describing how Bitcoin transactions and proofs work. Keeping the protocol simple brings benefits that are key to making it “a credibly neutral and globally trusted base layer,” Buterin wrote.
RISC-V versus EVM
The proposed transition to RISC-V would see an open-source instruction set defining how software communicates with processors. For Ethereum, the change would make Ethereum run faster by cutting out extra translation steps. Applications could work directly on the execution layer, potentially making some operations up to 100 times faster while keeping existing smart contracts working. By contrast, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is custom-built for Ethereum and requires translation to other formats first, slowing processes. RISC-V, meanwhile, can handle operations directly and is “simpler to reason about,” potentially “increasing the number of people who understand and can participate in protocol research,” Buterin claims. If applied to Ethereum, RISC-V could also decrease “the cost of creating new infrastructure,” reduce “long-term protocol maintenance costs,” the “risk of catastrophic bugs,” and minimize the “social attack surface” with fewer moving parts, Buterin explained.
Growing pains
Despite these ambitions, Buterin admits his failures at improving Ethereum. The network has often not done this “sometimes because of my own decisions,” and not doing so has led to actions done “in pursuit of benefits that have proven illusory,” he wrote. Buterin’s latest proposal could “break backward compatibility, demand massive developer retraining, and rely on immature tooling,” Dominick John, an analyst at Kronos Research, told Decrypt. Ethereum’s governance also “requires broad consensus across fragmented stakeholders, a massive coordination challenge,” John said. Still, some see potential for Ethereum beyond its market value. “Price isn’t the scoreboard for technological maturity.” Thad Pinakiewicz, researcher at Galaxy, wrote in a newsletter on Friday afternoon. “Ethereum isn’t failing because the price is flat. It’s succeeding because it’s laying down infrastructure others are copying.”
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair