Charles Hoskinson Backs Vitalik Buterin's RISC-V Vision for Ethereum's Future

In a rare moment of consensus between two of crypto's most prominent figures, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has publicly backed Ethereum

In a surprising moment of agreement between two crypto luminaries, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has publicly backed Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s latest technical proposal.

The brief exchange began on Sunday after Buterin posted his “Long-term L1 execution layer proposal” on the Ethereum Magicians forum.

Buterin’s proposal suggests retiring the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in favor of RISC-V, an open-source and extensible instruction set architecture. The change would massively increase efficiency in Ethereum’s execution layer, resolve key scaling bottlenecks, and simplify the core codebase — without altering Ethereum’s familiar account model or opcode structure.

“SLOAD, SSTORE, CALL — these opcodes would be exposed as RISC-V syscalls,” Buterin explained, emphasizing compatibility with existing smart contracts.

To maintain backward compatibility, Buterin outlined several paths: from dual-VM environments to a full interpreter-based migration.

The primary technical motivation is rooted in zero-knowledge proof performance. Drawing on data from Succinct’s ZK-EVM, Buterin points out that block execution consumes nearly half of all prover cycles — making it the most expensive operation in ZK circuits.

Other tasks, such as input deserialization, state root computation, and witness initialization, also contribute significantly, but Buterin argues that eliminating EVM translation layers through direct RISC-V integration could yield up to 100x performance improvements in some cases.

Even if other elements like pre-compiles become the new bottlenecks, he believes the switch to RISC-V would bring “very significant” gains in performance and scalability.

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