๐ If youโre a student choosing what to focus on, pick MATH. It will teach you to relentlessly rely on your own brain, think logically, break down problems, and solve them step by step in the right order. Thatโs the core skill youโll need to build companies and manage projects.
New @VitalikButerin post with a radical proposal: we should move Ethereum execution from the EVM to RISC-V.
Ethereum scaling in the long run will be limited by zkVM proving capabilities. If the goal is to scale the L1, it makes sense to remove one of the primary bottlenecks to proving: the EVM.
RISC-V zkVMs like SP1 can function in one of two ways: they can execute code "natively" (by compiling Rust directly down to RISC-V) or pass it through an interpreter like the EVM.
At Succinct, we found that the EVM's interpreter can add up to an 800x overhead to zkVM proving times. The EVM is very inefficient for ZK.
This proposal aims to align Ethereum much more closely with ZK proving costs. Concretely, the post suggests:
- Add RISC-V as the backend for smart contracts
- Optimize merklization with prover-friendly hash functions & deserialization
- Align the gas schedule with prover precompiles
Exciting times for Ethereum & ZK.