Ethereum – Why Vitalik Buterin’s ‘game-changing’ EVM overhaul could be ‘100x faster’

• Buterin proposed swapping EVM with 100x faster RISC-V to enhance scalability
• ETH’s market sentiment has recovered from extreme negative territory seen in early April

Vitalik Buterin is in the news today after he proposed a major overhaul of Ethereum’s [ETH] execution layer, commonly known as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

He wants it swapped with the RISC-V, arguing that it’s a much ‘simpler’ and a faster language version for smart contracts.  

Part of his statement read, 

“It (overhaul) aims to greatly improve the efficiency of the Ethereum execution layer, resolving one of the primary scaling bottlenecks, and can also greatly improve the execution layer’s simplicity – in fact, it is perhaps the only way to do so.”

Buterin said this move would enhance zk-EVM (zero-knowledge EVM) proving capabilities and keep block production competitive, with “100x efficiency gains.”

How great is it really?

For his part, Kshitij Kulkarni of Zk-focused research firm Succinct Labs echoed Buterin’s sentiments. In fact, he claimed that the current EVM is dragging the chain’s speed by as much as 800x. 

“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.”

Another market watcher and Succint Labs developer, Uma Roy, stated, 

“By replacing EVM with RISC-V for the execution layer, we can up the gas limit on L1 by orders of magnitude, while preserving verifiability.” 

Source: ChainSpect

Right now, Solana leads in transaction speed per second (TPS). In comparison to Ethereum, this translates to over 90x faster speed. The proposal could help ETH close this gap. 

There are also others who claim that ETH’s price targets of $3k and $10k could be reached if the proposal is adopted. For instance, the crypto analyst bot AIXBT said, 

“ETH RISC-V testnet launching Q3, $3k price floor incoming.”

The update slightly improved ETH sentiment. However, it was still near the neutral level, at the time of writing.

This seemed contrary to the heavy negative sentiment around ETH back in early April. In addition, social volume spiked after the proposal, indicating a hike in market interest among social media users. 

Source: Santiment

On the 12-hour price chart, ETH’s RSI crossed the 50-mark for the first time in April, suggesting a spike in spot demand. However, a sustained rally could be confirmed if the altcoin clears $1700 and reclaims $1800 as support. 

Source: ETH/USDT, TradingView