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Understanding Vitalik's RISC-V proposal to scale Ethereum(Draft)

/ 1 min read

ethereum, consensus, eip

While scrolling on Twitter, I saw tweets mentioning Vitalik’s new proposal on the Ethereum Magician forum. In his proposal, he stated that he wants to replace the current EVM with RISC-V architecture to improve and simplify the current EVM execution layer. The proposal also included technical benchmarks, brief mentions of EIPs in development and possible implementation details of the RISC-V architecture.

In this article, I will be doing a high-level overview of the proposal by answering the following questions:

  1. What is the current bottleneck of EVM?
  2. Which EIPs are currently being developed to address the bottleneck?
  3. What is RISC-V?
  4. How is RISC-V architecture going to improve Ethereum’s execution layer?
  5. How is the Ethereum community responding to the proposal?

What is the current bottleneck of EVM?

EVM is responsible for things like handling smart contract execution and updating the state of the chain. It is a stack-based with each stack having a maximum size of 256 bits and maximum of 1024 stacks.