Vitalik proposed a complete shift from the traditional EVM — the engine that executes smart contracts — to RISC-V. On the surface, this might sound like a technical tweak, but make no mistake: this is potentially revolutionary for Ethereum’s scalability and performance.
RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) used in hardware design. Unlike proprietary ISAs (like ARM or x86), RISC-V is freely available and increasingly popular in both academic and commercial hardware design.
Vitalik’s vision is to use RISC-V not in hardware, but as the underlying virtual architecture for Ethereum’s execution layer — effectively transforming how smart contracts are compiled and executed.
