Vitalik Wants to Replace the EVM With RISC-V – As Used By These 5 Blockchain Projects

In case you missed the news, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is bullish on RISC-V. So much so that he believes it should possibly replace the EVM – yes, the virtual machine that’s used to compile Ethereum’s smart contract logic. This revelation, which appeared in a blog post published on April 20, has split opinion across the cryptosphere to put it mildly.Within the Ethereum camp, many seem enthused by Vitalik’s belated acknowledgement that something has to change to revitalize the Layer 1’s fortunes – and it starts on the very underlying instruction manual that governs everything built on top. The architects of other blockchain networks, meanwhile, have been taking full advantage of the opportunity to point out that they’ve been running RISC-V for years. And who can blame them for feeling smug? The following projects can all take a bow for having seen the upside to RISC-V long before Vitalik began talking it up.

Polkadot

The other established project running RISC-V is of course Polkadot – even if it’s scarcely further ahead than Ethereum in implementing it. RISC-V is replacing WebAssembly (WASM) as part of JAM, Polkadot’s biggest upgrade in its history.  Technically, JAM uses PolkaVM, which is its own version of RISC-V. Apparently, “It is still very much RISC-V, but modified to better fit a virtual machine.”

While WASM has served Polkadot faithfully up until now, it’s long been recognized that for the network to evolve to meet the demands of modern applications, it’s necessary for performance to be higher and customization easier – all of which RISC-V supports. It’s also much more flexible in terms of the sort of hardware it supports, which makes JAM with PolkaVM running a breath of fresh air to a Polkadot community that’s beginning to look rejuvenated. Will RISC-V do the same for Ethereum, one wonders?

Cartesi

Cartesi’s been running RISC-V – pronounced “risk-five” apparently, though your friendly AI may beg to differ – for years. It underpins Cartesi’s modular blockchain, and can be traced all the way back to the dapp network’s beginnings in 2018. If there were a prize for being early to RISC-V, Cartesi would be dripping in rosettes right now. To be fair to its team, they seem to have little interest in flexing – not when there’s more important stuff to be doing like laying the framework for the next wave of high-performance dapps.

As for why Cartesi chose to use RISC-V in the first place, it appears to have arrived at a conclusion that Vitalik Buterin has recently arrived at himself: the EVM simply isn’t built for the cut and thrust of modern blockchain. It’s too slow and unwieldy and, while the developer tooling for it is widely available and extremely good, it can’t atone for the EVM’s inherent limitations. RISC-V, on the other hand, is much more flexible and can be used to run Linux and other established OS. As a result, devs can deploy dapps on Cartesi using their preferred programming language and environment.

Nervos Network

While not as well known as Cartesi or Polkadot, Nervos is another Layer 1 chain that’s been running RISC-V for some time now. Nervos is an interesting project actually, particularly if you enjoy perusing a pick and mix of blockchain parts. It’s Bitcoin based, using Proof of Work and a UTXO account model, yet runs as a Layer 2 – and all built on RISC-V. Like Cartesi, Nervos is designed to operate as a modular blockchain, with interoperability a primary goal. 

It’s not the easiest project to wrap one’s head around – its network is called Common Knowledge Base (CKB), for instance, but what does make sense is its team’s decision to rely on RISC-V as its VM for transaction and smart contract execution. Polkadot has its PolkaVM to run RISC-V and Nervos has its own CKB-VM to run RISC-V. It’s all highly arcane to regular crypto users, but devs who enjoy geeking out over this stuff will find Nervos’ architecture quite fascinating.

Other Web3 Projects Leveraging RISC-V

While the three projects profiled above are the most famous proponents of RISC-V, they’re not alone. Wanxiang Blockchain has been working on RISC-V since 2021, having formed a special interest group with a number of other partners to explore its applications. And more recently – as in, last month recently – Web3 Pi became the first project to sync a full Ethereum node on RISC-V, which is quite an achievement.Which brings us back to Ethereum, Vitalik, and the blockchain instruction set that looks poised to replace the EVM. Breakups are always hard and if Ethereum bids goodbye to the VM bearing its name, it will likely be protracted and messy. Vitalik has already acknowledged as much, conceding that it is a “radical idea for the future of the Ethereum execution layer.” Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if Ethereum embraces Vitalik’s proposal, it will be the most wide-ranging upgrade in the network’s history – and a feather in the cap of the projects that were running RISC-V all along.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice

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