A fleeting exchange on social media has drawn two of the crypto sector’s most prominent protocol architects into unexpected alignment. On Sunday, Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson replied to a technical blog post from Ethereum co‑founder Vitalik Buterin with a terse endorsement: “It makes sense, we are using RISC V with BitVMX. It’s the future.”
Buterin’s Latest Proposal For Ethereum
The comment was triggered by Buterin’s newly published “Long‑term L1 execution layer proposal” on the Ethereum Magicians forum, where he argues that Ethereum should abandon the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in favour of the open‑source RISC‑V instruction‑set architecture.
In the proposal Buterin calls the idea “equally as ambitious as the beam‑chain effort is for the consensus layer,” contending that a RISC‑V transition would “greatly improve the efficiency of the Ethereum execution layer, resolving one of the primary scaling bottlenecks,” while also simplifying the core codebase. He stresses that the familiar account model and opcodes “would stay exactly the same,” explaining that opcodes such as SLOAD, SSTORE and CALL would be exposed to contracts as RISC‑V syscalls.
“Old‑style EVM contracts will continue to work and will be fully two‑way interoperable with new‑style RISC‑V contracts,” he adds, sketching implementation paths that range from a dual‑VM environment to a more radical interpreter‑based migration.
Buterin’s technical motivation centres on the cost of proving EVM execution inside zero‑knowledge circuits. He points to measurements from Succinct’s ZK‑EVM showing that four tasks—deserialising inputs, initialising the witness database, computing state roots and executing blocks—consume the bulk of prover cycles.
The last of those, block execution, alone accounts for roughly half of total proving time. “Some numbers suggest that in limited cases, this could give efficiency gains over 100 ×,” Buterin writes, suggesting that direct access to a RISC‑V virtual machine could eliminate the overhead of compiling the EVM into RISC‑V for ZK proof generation. He argues that even if pre‑compiles become the new bottleneck, the shift would still produce “very significant” performance wins.
Cardano’s Use Of RISC‑V
Hoskinson’s swift assent carries weight because Cardano has been building around the same architecture. The network’s extended UTxO model is now being paired with BitVMX FORCE, a collaborative effort designed to let Cardano dApps tap into Bitcoin’s liquidity and decentralised‑finance activity.
BitVMX emulates a general‑purpose CPU for Bitcoin using RISC‑V, which in turn lets Cardano’s domain‑specific languages—Plutus and the low‑level Aiken—compile contracts that run seamlessly on either chain. By adopting the same instruction set for its off‑chain circuits, Cardano hopes to render zero‑knowledge proofs more efficient and to facilitate cross‑chain functionality without resorting to trusted bridges.
RISC‑V’s appeal is two‑fold. As an open specification it avoids licensing constraints while offering implementers freedom to add extensions; at the same time, it’s simple, orthogonal design is friendlier to zero‑knowledge proof systems than the EVM’s eclectic opcode catalogue or Bitcoin’s austere script. Hoskinson’s “It’s the future” therefore describes not merely Cardano’s roadmap but a growing industry trend, now echoed inside Ethereum’s own research circles.
Whether Ethereum’s highly conservative core‑dev process will embrace Buterin’s proposal remains uncertain. The Beacon‑chain merge, the Cancun/Deneb upgrade and the push toward statelessness already crowd the execution‑layer agenda. Yet the fact that both a UTXO‑based competitor and the originator of account‑based smart contracts now cite RISC‑V as the optimal long‑term target suggests that the argument will not dissipate quickly. As Buterin concludes, stripping the base layer to “well within” ten thousand lines of code may require “this kind of radical change.”
At press time, Cardano traded at $0.64.
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