TLDR
- Vitalik Buterin proposes replacing Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V architecture
- The change aims to make Ethereum “close to as simple as Bitcoin” within five years
- The transition could boost performance up to 100 times while maintaining compatibility
- Simplification would reduce development costs, maintenance needs, and risk of bugs
- Ethereum’s market share has fallen to 7% in April with prices around $1,800
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a new vision for the blockchain platform in a May 3 blog post, proposing to replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with RISC-V architecture. This change aims to boost performance while making the network simpler and more accessible.
Buterin believes Ethereum could “become close to as simple as Bitcoin” within five years. The comparison is deliberate, as he specifically praised Bitcoin’s protocol design in his post.
“One of the best things about Bitcoin is how beautifully simple the protocol is,” Buterin wrote. He explained that this simplicity brings key benefits that help make Bitcoin “a credibly neutral and globally trusted base layer.”
The proposal centers on adopting RISC-V, an open-source instruction set that defines how software communicates with processors. For Ethereum, this would cut out extra translation steps currently required by the EVM.
With RISC-V, applications could work directly on the execution layer. This could make some operations up to 100 times faster while preserving compatibility with existing smart contracts.
Simplifying the L1https://t.co/fVbQCkheX9
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 3, 2025
Technical Advantages of RISC-V
The current EVM is custom-built for Ethereum and requires translation to other formats, which slows down processes. RISC-V, by contrast, can handle operations directly and is “simpler to reason about,” according to Buterin.
This simplification could increase the number of people who understand and can participate in protocol research. It could also reduce the cost of creating new infrastructure and lower long-term protocol maintenance costs.
Buterin states that the change would minimize the “risk of catastrophic bugs” and reduce the “social attack surface” by having fewer moving parts in the system.
The plan targets three major areas of simplification: Consensus Layer, Execution Layer, and sharing components across protocol layers. For the Consensus Layer, Buterin suggests implementing a ‘three-slot finality’ design to remove complex concepts.
For the Execution Layer, he points out that “The EVM is increasingly growing in complexity, and much of that complexity has proven unnecessary.”
Market Challenges and Criticisms
Despite these ambitious goals, Buterin admits to past failures in improving Ethereum. The network has often not met simplicity goals “sometimes because of my own decisions,” he wrote.
Not all analysts are convinced by the proposal. Dominick John, an analyst at Kronos Research, told Decrypt that Buterin’s latest proposal could “break backward compatibility, demand massive developer retraining, and rely on immature tooling.”
John also noted that Ethereum’s governance “requires broad consensus across fragmented stakeholders, a massive coordination challenge.”
Ethereum has struggled in the market recently, with its share collapsing to an all-time low of 7% in April. The cryptocurrency has been hovering around $1,800, remaining 63% below its 2021 all-time high.
By comparison, Bitcoin is only 13% down from its peak price earlier this year. Nevertheless, some analysts remain optimistic about Ethereum’s recovery prospects.
Thad Pinakiewicz, researcher at Galaxy, offered a more positive perspective. “Price isn’t the scoreboard for technological maturity,” he wrote in a recent newsletter. “Ethereum isn’t failing because the price is flat. It’s succeeding because it’s laying down infrastructure others are copying.”
Buterin ultimately frames the simplification effort as a long-term investment. “Caring about simplicity is, like decentralization, a short-term cost for the sake of benefits that do not appear immediately.”
