Ethereum Co-Founder aims to increase the scalability and resilience of the Ethereum network by 100X+. Cofounder Vitalik Buterin aims to achieve this efficacy by replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), a simpler protocol. In a blog post, Buterin wrote, “As an alternative I recently proposed a more radical approach: instead of making medium-sized (but still disruptive) changes to the EVM for the sake of a 1.5x gain, perform a transition to a new and much better and simpler VM for the sake of a 100x gain.”
Buterin stated that the EVM was overly optimized for “forms of cryptography that are today becoming less and less relevant” and “Attempting to address these present-day realities piecemeal will not work”. Therefore, Buterin decided to replace the EVM with either RISC-V or another VM.
Ethereum aims to be the world ledger: the platform that stores civilization’s assets and records, the base layer for finance, governance, high-value data authentication, and more. However, this requires two things: scalability and resilience.”. These two vital factors rely on the simplicity of the protocol.
Explaining the benefits of keeping the protocol simple, on a credible global platform like Ethereum and Bitcoin, Buterin stated that when the protocol is simple, it is easier to reason about, and the number of people who understand and can participate in protocol research, development, and governance increases. This increased participation reduces the risk that the protocol gets dominated by a technocratic class with a high entry barrier. Moreover, it greatly decreases the cost of creating new infrastructure that interfaces with the protocol (eg, new clients, new provers, new logging and other developer tools).
Additionally, “It reduces long-term protocol maintenance costs.
It reduces the risk of catastrophic bugs, both in the specification itself and in the implementation. It also makes it easier to verify that there are no such bugs.
It reduces the social attack surface: there are fewer moving parts, and so fewer places to guard against special interests,” stated the cofounder.
A RISC is an open-source ISA which defines how software communicates with hardware. It acts like a translator between the programs and the processor telling what instructions it can execute and how to interact with memory and registers.
