Just yesterday (April 18), Vitalik Buterin proposed a radical architectural upgrade: replacing the EVM with RISC-V as Ethereum’s core execution layer. This shift could drastically improve ZK-proof generation efficiency (by 50–100x) and simplify execution, especially for zkRollups like Linea.
Given Linea’s zkEVM model and performance-focused architecture, I believe this proposal could become a key inflection point. But it raises questions—both technical and strategic.
Why RISC-V matters:
RISC-V is ZK-friendly, with a small instruction set (~50 instructions vs. x86’s thousands), perfect for rollup environments.
ZK provers like Linea’s could eliminate bytecode translation overhead.
With Poseidon hashes outperforming Keccak (2M vs. 15K hashes/sec), this could supercharge proving performance.
Key Questions for the Linea Core Team:
Is Linea already exploring RISC-V as a future execution layer or in parallel with EVM?
Would supporting RISC-V require a redesign of your proving circuits or architecture?
How do you see Solidity and dev tooling (Hardhat, MetaMask, etc.) adapting in a dual-VM world?
What’s your outlook on Ethereum’s roadmap and how Linea aligns—are we aiming to lead this transition?
Could Linea eventually support native RISC-V contracts while maintaining backward EVM compatibility?
Do you see this shift creating new opportunities for Linea-native projects (e.g., gas cost optimization, new DeFi or gaming primitives)?
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this an understand the new proposals on a deeper level, but Im’ not a dev and even after a whole day now of deep diving, it’s still pretty well over my head and difficult to really draw any meaningful conclusions of my own on what might be better than another.
There seem to be a lot of pros and cons of all of the different proposals and I just saw another new one today by Dank someone (I can’t remember, Altcoin Daily covered it, a new EIP proposal).
Scaling the L1 seemed like the best option to me, basically Vitalik’s proposal of switching to RISC-V and dramatically upping Eth itself in TPS. To me, this approach is the most direct and I would think have the most impact on Eth sentiment, if Eth itself was powerful enough to just handle most things, and maybe L2 for something like credit card payments or whatever stuff like that, or gaming. Solana doesn’t seem ready to handle everything either imho, the Trump launch brought Solana to it’s knees again.
Obviously this has less impact on the L2s versus upgrades specifically tailored to favor the function of the L2s, and that makes me wonder… One would think that unless they were all 100% Objective, which is frankly lets be real a little bit tough to imagine, that they might be more inclined to not make themselves obsolete and want upgrades that favor the L1. Linea already doing more than the others to support Eth though gives me more confidence is any statements that they may make, which made me wonder about Declan’s ideas presented there, but I haven’t found any good sources on all of this that seem totally impartial and also very well educated to weigh the pros and cons and deep dive all of these approaches.
