Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed two major technical changes to improve the network’s efficiency for proving systems. He advocates replacing the current state tree structure with a more efficient binary design and eventually shifting the core virtual machine to RISC-V. Buterin stated these components account for over 80% of proving bottlenecks and are critical for enabling scalable zero-knowledge applications on Ethereum.
**Vitalik Buterin** has introduced proposals for execution-layer changes to Ethereum’s fundamental architecture. In a detailed post, he argued these modifications are necessary to address the chain’s most significant proving bottlenecks.
Buterin specified that the state tree and virtual machine together account for over 80% of constraints affecting proof efficiency. He called these targets “basically mandatory” for enabling scalable client-side and zero-knowledge proving use cases.
The first proposal centers on EIP-7864, which would replace the current hexary tree with a binary tree using a more efficient hash function. This change could shorten Merkle branches by roughly four times, reducing bandwidth and making verification cheaper.
This binary design could improve proving efficiency by 3-4 times from shorter branches alone. Additional gains are expected from shifting to hash functions like BLAKE3 or a Poseidon variant, with the latter offering potential for up to 100 times improvement.
The proposed state tree would also group storage slots into “pages” for more efficient access. Buterin explained a prover-friendly state tree would allow zero-knowledge applications to compose directly with Ethereum’s state.
The second, longer-term proposal is to eventually replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine with a RISC-V-based VM. Buterin expressed high conviction this would become “the obvious thing to do” after other state roadmap upgrades are complete.
He stated a RISC-V VM would be more execution-efficient, prover-friendly, and simpler. Many existing provers are already written in RISC-V, and an interpreter could be implemented in only a few hundred lines of code.
A phased transition plan would begin with using the new VM for precompiles, then allowing direct contract deployment. The final phase would retire the EVM into a compatibility layer written as a smart contract in the new system.
Under this roadmap, users would retain full backward compatibility apart from gas cost changes. Buterin’s latest proposals follow his recent introduction of a quantum-resistance roadmap for the network.
