Vitalik Is Taking A Calculated Risk With Ethereum’s RISC-V Proposal

A few weeks ago, if you had asked anyone in the Ethereum world what they knew about the RISC-V, the chances are good that your question would have been met with blank stares. 

But thanks to Vitalik Buterin’s April 20 proposal to reinvent the world’s most popular smart contract blockchain, such a question is far more likely to elicit at least a mumbled response. Perhaps they’ll say something about its potential to boost Ethereum’s scalability, speed up transactions, reduce gas fees and improve its security. 

What Vitalik has proposed is to replace Ethereum’s foundational Ethereum Virtual Machine with the much more user-friendly and efficient RISC-V instruction architecture set. He makes a compelling argument in its favor, pointing to its open-source nature, improved efficiency, backward compatibility and superior developer tooling

Why Does Ethereum Need RISC-V?

Most Ethereum followers are well aware of the blockchain’s struggles, perhaps not so in terms of its price, but from the perspective of developers. Compared to other Layer-1 blockchains, such as Solana, Avalanche, Sui, Tezos and Polkadot, Ethereum is much more complex, slower and expensive to run. Running a dApp on Ethereum is like driving an old Ford Model T, as opposed to sitting in a Tesla Model Y on cruise control. 

By replacing the EVM with RISC-V, Ethereum will be getting a major overhaul that could help it to regain parity with those newer blockchains. 

RISC-V is an open-source standard for designing computer processors. More specifically, it provides a standardized way for software to communicate with the hardware it’s running on, so developers can build applications that work on any kind of device. It competes with alternative instruction set architectures such as ARM and x86, but its open-source nature means it can be used by anyone, without paying licensing fees. 

As for the EVM, this is a decentralized computer or “virtual machine” that can be thought of as Ethereum’s “operating system”. Just as Windows runs and executes all of the software on a PC, the EVM hosts all of the decentralized applications and smart contracts on Ethereum. 

Vitalik’s proposal to use a RISC-V-based operating system is an attempt to address the key scalability bottlenecks in Ethereum by improving the way smart contracts are executed. Instead of using the EVM as they do now, Ethereum’s dApps and smart contracts would instead use RISC-V to talk to the underlying blockchain. 

It’s a change that would make Ethereum run much faster, as it eliminates multiple translation steps. With EVM, dApps are required to translate their commands into additional formats to talk to the blockchain. With RISC-V, they would instead run directly on the execution layer, which means they could execute commands up to 100-times faster. 

As a result, Vitalik says transaction speeds could drop from five minutes (in a best-case scenario) to as little as three seconds, and those transactions would also be much cheaper in terms of gas costs than they were before. 

These are kinds of efficiency gains that have long been considered a fantasy by Ethereum users. Most have all but given up on the prospect of catching up with lightning-fast rivals like Solana and Sui. 

“It aims to greatly improve the efficiency of the Ethereum execution layer, resolving one of the primary scaling bottlenecks, and can also greatly improve the execution layer’s simplicity – in fact, it is perhaps the only way to do so,” Vitalik wrote.

Developer Friendly

Vitalik also argues that RISC-V is “simpler to reason about”, and says this could pave the way for many more people to “understand and participate in protocol research”. In addition, he claims that the new architecture would lower the cost of creating new infrastructure for Ethereum, reducing its maintenance costs and minimizing its attack surface, as there would be fewer moving parts. 

Another key benefit of RISC-V is that it wouldn’t alter anything else about the way Ethereum works. Core aspects such as smart contract storage, accounts, smart contract calls and ETH balances would still behave in the same way as they do now, making for a smooth transaction. Moreover, smart contracts could still be written in Ethereum’s Solidity programming language, as this is compatible with RISC-V, ensuring backwards compatibility with existing dApps. 

To get an idea of what RISC-V can do for Ethereum, all we have to do is look at some of the blockchains that already use it. The best known is Cartesi, which has been using the instruction set architecture for seven years already. Cartesi adopted RISC-V as its execution layer because its goal is to make Web3 development compatible with mainstream programming languages and tools, avoiding the need to reinvent the wheel. 

With EVM, developers have to rebuild basic computing operations, which limits their expressive power due to the intense labor involved. On the other hand, RISC-V already supports Linux and all of its tooling. So developers would be able to use common programming languages such as C++, Rust and Java to create dApps, instead of having to learn a specialized programming language. This would mean thousands of developers from the Web2 world could jump straight into blockchain development, potentially unleashing a flood of new Web3 applications onto the world. 

Vitalik’s idea has gotten an enthusiastic response from Cartesi’s lead developer Felipe Argento, who points out that RISC-V is supported by hundreds of global corporations and thousands of developers worldwide. He added that it would be a “pleasure” to help Ethereum with its integration.  

It remains to be seen if the Ethereum community will agree to implement RISC-V, but if it does decide to do so, then you can bet there will be a lot of scrutiny over Cartesi’s implementation to understand how it works, and perhaps even improve on it. 

A RISC Worth Taking

As the first smart contract blockchain to emerge, Ethereum set the standard for others to follow, and the vast majority of L1 networks are built atop of customized virtual machines just like EVM. For instance, Solana runs on the Solana Virtual Machine or SVM, and Sui has the Sui Virtual Machine. 

The advantage of using a bespoke VM is that blockchain architects have more control over how they build their networks, but it comes with a significant downside. It’s bad news for Blockchain developers, who are forced to spend countless hours learning about, and familiarizing themselves with the underlying VM before they can even think about creating dApps. Another problem is that blockchain-specific VMs have limited tooling and interoperability, increasing the friction for developers and complicating interactions with other blockchains. 

By implementing RISC-V as an execution layer, Ethereum (and other blockchains) can fix all of these issues. But Vitalik himself warns that such a transition would be a monumental task on a blockchain that’s already up and running, hosting thousands of critical smart contracts that cannot afford any disruption. 

Like any significant update, there will be some major risks involved. But it’s a calculated risk, as the potential of RISC-V is so great that it will likely be well worth enduring the short-term pain.