I'll find out whether this will make Ethereum reverse its decline? V God's major proposal: EVM replaces RISC-V!

Against the backdrop of Ethereum facing competition in other public chains and the setback of Layer2 strategy, co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a "bold reform": replacing the existing Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) with a RISC-V instruction set architecture, aiming to improve the efficiency of smart contract execution through a simpler and more general underlying system.

Vitalik makes a shocking proposal: Change EVM to RISC-V?

Vitalik posted a proposal at the Ethereum Magicians forum yesterday (20th), pointing out that Ethereum has been limited by execution layer bottlenecks in scaling and performance, especially when combined with ZK-EVM (zero-knowledge virtual machines), which proves too expensive. He argued that if the underlying language of smart contracts is converted from EVM to RISC-V, it will improve the speed of contract execution, simplify the system, and make it easier to expand in the future.

RISC-V is an open source streamlined instruction set architecture that is closer to the underlying language of traditional CPUs than the current Ethereum-specific virtual machine language, with a wider range of development tools and support environments. Vitalik says that most developers can still develop through languages ​​such as Solidity or Vyper, just compile the backend to RISC-V.

RISC-V proves that efficiency is more than a hundred times

Vitalik quotes ZK-EVM's cycle data and points out that the four most resource-consuming steps of the execution layer include: input data decoding (deserialization), state verification (initialization of witness database), block execution and state root calculation, among which block execution and input data decoding are the most resource-consuming steps, and the two together account for more than half of the overall calculation.

Note: The so-called "cycle data" refers to the processing cycle consumed by each execution step when generating the ZK proof, and can be regarded as a quantitative indicator of resource consumption.

Taking the cycle count displayed in the chart as an example, different block types (such as blocks containing bn254 or bls12_381syscall), block execution alone accounts for 31% to 60% of the execution cost.

He pointed out that many ZK-EVMs have compiled EVM into RISC-V and then performed zero-knowledge proofs, so "let developers directly use RISC-V is actually more efficient."

Vitalik believes that if the contract is run directly on RISC-V, the overall ZK proves that it is not a dream to increase efficiency by more than 100 times. According to data provided by Vitalik, EVMs can be as efficient as 800 times slower than native RISC-V when performing intensive calculations such as Fibonacci.

EVM will not exit the stage immediately

It should be noted that Vitalik proposes not a one-time replacement, but supports the "dual VM coexistence" mode: EVM contracts and RISC-V contracts can coexist and call each other, and will not destroy the operation of existing smart contracts. In addition, he also proposed a further concept of "virtual machine interpreter", running traditional EVM contracts through interpreters written by RISC-V to achieve smooth transitions, further unify the underlying language and significantly simplify execution layer specifications.

He stressed that Ethereum has been making any slight simplification at the protocol layer in the past (such as removing SELFDESTRUCT). If we really want to create a long-term maintenance-simple execution layer, adopting RISC-V may be the only pragmatic way.

Ethereum processing fee hits a five-year low

As this proposal is released, the Ethereum mainnet is facing economic pressure. On-chain data shows that the average transaction fee of Ethereum dropped to US$0.16 in April, a new low since 2020, indicating that the demand for main network transactions has decreased significantly, and more and more users have turned to Layer2, resulting in the dilution of main chain revenue.

Ethereum (ETH) price also fell into a downturn, trading price fell to around $1,600. Many analysts warn that if the Ethereum main chain cannot restore its revenue and expansion advantages, ETH prices may continue to fall.

Can RISC-V help Ethereum turn the situation around?

Vitalik's proposal is not only a reform of the technology architecture, but may also become a turning point in Ethereum's rebuilding market confidence. When new generations of high-throughput public chains such as Solana and Sui attract developers and funds with a simpler monolithic architecture, if Ethereum can significantly improve execution efficiency without sacrificing security and decentralization, the competition threshold for L1 will be redefined.

Although this architectural change is still in the conceivable stage, if implemented, it will affect the development tool chain, node operation model and Layer2 integration strategy, and is one of the most systematic changes in Ethereum in the past decade.

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