Vitalik Buterin's Two-Part Plan to Rebuild Ethereum's Execution Layer From the Ground Up

On March 1, 2026, Vitalik Buterin published one of the most technically consequential posts in Ethereum's history, laying out a comprehensive two-part plan to overhaul the network's execution layer from its foundational architecture upward. The proposal addressed two structures that together account for more than 80% of Ethereum's current proving bottleneck: the state tree used to store and verify the network's global state, and the Ethereum Virtual Machine used to execute every smart contract. Neither is a minor adjustment. Replacing the state tree requires a network-wide migration of all Ethereum state data into a new cryptographic structure. Replacing the EVM would be the most significant change to Ethereum's core execution architecture since the network launched in 2015. Vitalik Buterin framed these changes not as optional improvements but as structural necessities: "They are deep changes that many shrink away from, thinking that it is more pragmatic to be incrementalist," he wrote. "But incrementalism will not resolve Ethereum's core proving inefficiencies." The proposals arrive at a moment when Ethereum faces genuine competitive pressure, when the EVM's limitations in zero-knowledge proving environments have become increasingly visible, and when the Ethereum Foundation has undergone leadership changes specifically to provide clearer directional roadmapping. This article delivers a complete technical and strategic analysis of both proposals, their implementation timelines, the community debate they have generated, and what they mean for Ethereum's long-term position.

Who Is Vitalik Buterin and Why Does His Proposal Matter?

Vitalik Buterin is the co-founder of Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency network by market capitalization, and the most influential individual technical voice in the Ethereum ecosystem. Born in Russia in 1994 and raised in Canada, Buterin conceived Ethereum at 19 after becoming frustrated by the limitations of Bitcoin's scripting language for building general-purpose decentralized applications. His original 2013 whitepaper proposed a Turing-complete blockchain capable of executing arbitrary smart contracts, a vision that became the foundational architecture for the entire decentralized application economy.

Key facts about Buterin's current role and influence include:

• Technical authority without formal control: Unlike a traditional CEO or CTO, Buterin holds no official governance power over Ethereum's protocol development. Changes to the network require consensus from an independent community of core developers, researchers, and client teams. Yet his proposals consistently shape the direction of that community through intellectual leadership rather than institutional authority
• Consistent advocacy for deep change: The March 2026 proposal is the culmination of a multi-year pattern of Buterin championing structural changes that many developers initially resist. He has argued consistently that Ethereum "has already made jet engine changes in-flight once (the merge) and can handle roughly four more: the state tree, lean consensus, ZK-EVM verification, and a VM change"
• The Ethereum Foundation transition context: Earlier in 2025, the Ethereum Foundation underwent a leadership transition after community criticism that the ecosystem lacked a clear roadmap and was losing competitive ground to Solana, Sui, Aptos, and other high-throughput networks. Buterin's March 2026 post represents a direct response to this critique, providing the most detailed architectural roadmap he has publicly articulated
• ETH price and competitive context: The proposal arrived against a backdrop where ETH had underperformed BTC and several major altcoins, with declining transaction volumes on Ethereum mainnet and growing developer frustration with EVM constraints in ZK proving environments. Buterin's framing acknowledged this context indirectly while focusing on long-term architectural necessity

Pillar One: Binary State Trees and EIP-7864

The first component of Vitalik Buterin's execution layer overhaul targets what he identifies as the primary proving bottleneck in Ethereum's current architecture: the hexary Keccak Merkle Patricia Tree used to store and verify the network's global state.

Key technical details of the binary state tree proposal:

• What the current tree does: Every account balance, smart contract code, and storage value in Ethereum is stored in the Merkle Patricia Tree, a data structure that allows any piece of state to be verified by tracing a path from the root hash through intermediate nodes to the target value. The current tree uses a hexary (16-branch) structure and the Keccak hash function
• Why it creates a proving bottleneck: The Keccak hash function was not designed with zero-knowledge proof systems in mind. Proving a single Keccak hash computation inside a ZK circuit requires enormous computational resources. Every state access in Ethereum's execution layer requires traversing the tree and computing Keccak hashes at each node, meaning ZK provers must compute thousands of Keccak operations to prove any moderately complex transaction
• EIP-7864  the proposed replacement: Buterin backed EIP-7864, which would replace the hexary Keccak tree with a binary tree structure using more ZK-friendly hash functions. The specific hash candidates under discussion include Blake3 and Poseidon, both of which are substantially more efficient to compute inside ZK circuits. According to the analysis underlying the proposal, Blake3 and Poseidon hash functions could accelerate Ethereum's proving efficiency by up to 100x over the current Keccak setup
• The 75% Merkle branch reduction: The binary tree structure also reduces Merkle branch size by approximately 75% compared to the hexary structure. Smaller branches reduce bandwidth requirements for light clients, make state proofs cheaper to generate and verify, and improve the economics of private information retrieval systems built on Ethereum's state
• Credit to Guillaume Ballet: Vitalik Buterin explicitly credited developer Guillaume Ballet and others for their work on EIP-7864, which has been in draft stages since January 2025. This attribution signals that the proposal has meaningful engineering support beyond Buterin's personal advocacy
• Verkle Trees vs. binary trees: The binary tree proposal represents a notable shift from earlier plans. Verkle Trees were previously cited as a leading candidate for inclusion in a 2026 hard fork. Concerns around quantum computing vulnerabilities in the elliptic curve cryptography underlying Verkle Trees helped reignite interest in binary tree approaches around mid-2024, with the binary tree alternative ultimately gaining more momentum in the developer community
• Near-term roadmap placement: The binary state tree change is considered the more near-term and technically concrete of the two proposals, with Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade expected in the first half of 2026 and the Hegota upgrade to follow later in the year. State tree changes are central to ongoing planning for both forks

Pillar Two: Replacing the EVM With RISC-V

The second and more radical component of Vitalik Buterin's proposal is the long-term replacement of the Ethereum Virtual Machine with RISC-V, an open-source instruction set architecture that most ZK provers already use internally.

Key technical details of the RISC-V proposal:

• What the EVM is: The Ethereum Virtual Machine is the sandboxed computation environment that executes every smart contract deployed on Ethereum. It defines the instruction set, memory model, and execution rules that all Ethereum smart contracts must conform to. The EVM has been Ethereum's core execution engine since the network launched in 2015 and is the direct reason that "EVM-compatible" has become the dominant smart contract development standard globally
• Why the EVM creates ZK proving friction: The EVM was designed before ZK proof systems became a central focus of Ethereum's scaling roadmap. Its instruction set, particularly its memory model and the Keccak-heavy operations required for contract storage access, creates enormous overhead when translated into ZK circuits. Succinct co-founder Kshitij Kulkarni stated that the EVM interpreter "adds up to an 800x overhead to zkVM proving times," and data from Succinct's zkEVM proving shows approximately 59% of verification time is consumed simply by executing EVM code itself
• Why RISC-V specifically: RISC-V is the instruction set architecture that most ZK provers are already written in. Making the blockchain VM be RISC-V removes an entire translation layer between the execution environment and the proving system. Instead of translating EVM instructions into RISC-V for the prover to process, the prover and the execution environment would speak the same language natively. Buterin described a RISC-V interpreter as requiring "only a few hundred lines of code," and said this is what a blockchain VM "should feel like"
• 100x efficiency gain potential: According to Buterin's analysis, replacing the EVM with RISC-V would reduce the ZK prover translation overhead, cutting the protocol's proving bottleneck by over 80% and delivering efficiency gains exceeding 100x for certain application categories. These improvements would directly reduce costs for any ZK application that currently must maintain separate state trees to avoid Ethereum's native architecture constraints
• The three-stage deployment plan: Buterin proposed a careful three-stage rollout designed to preserve backward compatibility throughout the transition. Stage one deploys RISC-V only for precompiles, replacing approximately 80% of today's precompiles with NewVM code. Stage two allows users and developers to deploy RISC-V contracts directly alongside existing EVM contracts. Stage three retires the EVM entirely by converting it into a smart contract written in the new VM, preserving full backward compatibility for existing deployed contracts except for gas cost adjustments
• The generality argument: Buterin's most pointed argument for replacing the EVM was not technical efficiency but principle. He observed that developers increasingly try to avoid the EVM wherever possible, treating it as an obstacle rather than a feature. "Ethereum's whole point is its generality, and if the EVM is not good enough to actually meet the needs of that generality, then we should tackle the problem head-on, and make a better VM," he wrote

The Community Debate: RISC-V vs. WASM and the Offchain Labs Rebuttal

Vitalik Buterin's RISC-V proposal has not gone unchallenged, and the resulting technical debate reveals the genuine complexity of the decision.

Key dimensions of the community debate include:

• The Offchain Labs rebuttal: In November 2025, researchers from Offchain Labs, the core development organization behind Arbitrum, published a detailed rebuttal to the RISC-V proposal. Their core argument: RISC-V excels at ZK proving, but the "delivery ISA" (the instruction set developers write and deploy to) and the "proving ISA" (the instruction set ZK provers use internally) do not need to be the same. According to this view, developers and provers can operate in different instruction sets connected by a compilation step, meaning RISC-V's proving advantages do not require imposing RISC-V as the deployment target
• WebAssembly (WASM) as an alternative: Offchain Labs argued that WebAssembly is a better long-term choice for Ethereum's smart contract execution format. WASM has broader toolchain support, better developer familiarity, an established multi-language compilation target, and does not require the same low-level systems programming expertise as RISC-V. The argument is that Ethereum should optimize the developer experience for the delivery layer while optimizing the proving layer separately
• The precompile simplification case: One area of near-consensus is that a more efficient VM would dramatically reduce or eliminate the need for many of Ethereum's current precompiles. Precompiles are special built-in contracts that perform computationally expensive operations more cheaply than EVM bytecode allows. A VM that can perform these operations efficiently in native code would make most precompiles unnecessary, simplifying the protocol and reducing the surface area for implementation divergence between clients
• Broad consensus on state tree first: While the VM debate remains unresolved, there is broad community consensus that the binary state tree migration (EIP-7864) should proceed first, as it carries less backward compatibility risk, has more concrete implementation work behind it, and is clearly a prerequisite for any meaningful client-side proving expansion regardless of which VM is ultimately chosen
• Buterin's confidence in eventual VM consensus: Buterin acknowledged that the VM changes are more speculative and lack broad consensus at the time of writing. However, he expressed confidence that once the state roadmap is in place, replacing the EVM will become the obvious choice as the remaining proving bottleneck in a post-binary-tree Ethereum architecture

The Ethereum Upgrade Roadmap: Glamsterdam, Hegota, and Beyond

Understanding Vitalik Buterin's proposals requires placing them within Ethereum's near-term upgrade schedule.

Key upcoming upgrade details:

• Glamsterdam (H1 2026): The Glamsterdam hard fork is expected in the first half of 2026 and has been described as targeting MEV fairness on the network. Core developers have not finalized the headline EIP for this upgrade, but state tree changes and execution layer improvements remain central to ongoing planning discussions
• Hegota (H2 2026): A second hard fork expected later in 2026, with Hegota providing an additional deployment window for execution layer improvements after Glamsterdam. The two-fork structure in a single year reflects the accelerated pace of protocol development that the Ethereum Foundation leadership transition was designed to enable
• The "four jet engine changes" framework: Buterin has articulated that Ethereum can handle approximately four major architectural changes in flight, analogous to replacing a jet engine while the plane is flying, following the successful merge transition in 2022. The four changes are: state tree migration, lean consensus (Beam Chain), ZK-EVM verification at L1, and VM replacement. The execution layer overhaul proposals address the first and fourth of these simultaneously
• Beam Chain (consensus layer): Separately from the execution layer proposals, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has proposed the Beam Chain, a ground-up redesign of Ethereum's consensus layer. The Beam Chain and execution layer overhaul together represent the most comprehensive architectural rethinking of Ethereum's entire protocol stack since the merge, and their combined timeline represents the most ambitious technical roadmap in Ethereum's history

What This Means for Ethereum's Competitive Position

The practical market implications of Vitalik Buterin's execution layer overhaul proposals extend beyond technical architecture into Ethereum's competitive standing against alternative smart contract platforms.

Key competitive implications:

• Addressing the "ETH L1 is dead" narrative: The March 2026 proposal directly responds to a persistent narrative in the Ethereum community that the L2-centric roadmap has hollowed out Ethereum mainnet's value proposition. By targeting 100x proving efficiency improvements at L1, the proposals argue that Ethereum's base layer can remain competitive with purpose-built high-throughput chains rather than ceding execution performance entirely to Layer 2 solutions
• ZK proving as the strategic battleground: The proposals signal that Buterin believes ZK proof systems will be central to Ethereum's long-term scaling architecture, and that the current EVM and state tree are the primary obstacles to maximizing their effectiveness. Both proposals are fundamentally motivated by the goal of making Ethereum's base layer as ZK-friendly as its Layer 2 ecosystem
• Developer continuity through backward compatibility: The three-stage RISC-V deployment, which converts the EVM into a smart contract rather than deleting it, addresses the most critical concern for the $100 billion in deployed smart contract value currently dependent on EVM execution. Existing contracts continue to function while the ecosystem migrates to the new execution environment
• ETH price implications: Market analysts have connected the publication of the execution layer overhaul proposals with renewed institutional interest in ETH as a long-term store of value and utility asset. The most direct price implication is that a successful 100x proving efficiency improvement would materially reduce the cost of ZK-based applications on Ethereum, expanding the addressable market for ETH as gas and potentially reversing the declining mainnet transaction volume trend

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Who is Vitalik Buterin and what did he propose on March 1, 2026?

Vitalik Buterin is the co-founder of Ethereum, who conceived the network at age 19 and published its original whitepaper in 2013. On March 1, 2026, he published a detailed technical post outlining a two-part plan to overhaul Ethereum's execution layer. The first part proposes replacing the current hexary Keccak Merkle Patricia Tree with a binary tree using more ZK-friendly hash functions through EIP-7864. The second part proposes eventually replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine with RISC-V, an open-source instruction set architecture that most ZK provers already use internally. Together, the two changes target the structures that account for more than 80% of Ethereum's current proving bottleneck, which is the primary technical constraint preventing large-scale client-side ZK verification of Ethereum's state.

What is EIP-7864 and why does replacing the state tree matter for Ethereum?

EIP-7864 proposes replacing Ethereum's current hexary Keccak Merkle Patricia Tree with a binary tree structure using more ZK-efficient hash functions including Blake3 and Poseidon. The current Keccak hash function was not designed for ZK proving environments and requires enormous computational resources to verify inside ZK circuits. Replacing it with Poseidon or Blake3 could accelerate Ethereum's proving efficiency by up to 100x. The binary structure also reduces Merkle branch sizes by approximately 75%, lowering bandwidth requirements for light clients and improving the economics of applications that need to access or prove Ethereum state. EIP-7864 has been in draft development since January 2025 and is the more near-term and technically concrete of the two execution layer proposals, with state tree changes central to both the Glamsterdam and Hegota hard fork planning for 2026.

Why does Vitalik Buterin want to replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine with RISC-V?

Buterin's case for replacing the EVM with RISC-V rests on three arguments. First, efficiency: most ZK provers are already written in RISC-V, so making the blockchain VM RISC-V eliminates a translation layer between execution and proving. The EVM interpreter currently adds approximately 800x overhead to zkVM proving times, and RISC-V alignment could deliver proving efficiency gains exceeding 100x. Second, simplicity: a RISC-V interpreter requires only a few hundred lines of code, compared to the EVM's complex and growing specification. Third, generality: Buterin argued that developers increasingly avoid the EVM rather than using it, which defeats Ethereum's core value proposition. A VM that developers want to use rather than work around would restore Ethereum's generality claim.

What is the three-stage plan for deploying RISC-V on Ethereum?

Buterin proposed a three-stage RISC-V deployment designed to preserve full backward compatibility throughout the transition. Stage one deploys RISC-V exclusively for precompiles, replacing approximately 80% of current precompiles with NewVM code while the EVM continues to handle all smart contract execution. Stage two allows developers and users to deploy RISC-V contracts directly alongside EVM contracts, beginning the migration of new application development to the new execution environment. Stage three retires the EVM entirely by converting it into a smart contract written in RISC-V, so that existing deployed EVM contracts continue to execute through this compatibility wrapper with no code changes required, though gas costs may adjust during the transition period.

How do Vitalik Buterin's execution layer proposals affect Ethereum's competitive position against Solana and other high-throughput chains?

The execution layer overhaul proposals address a persistent narrative that Ethereum's L2-centric scaling strategy has hollowed out mainnet's value and left it unable to compete on performance with purpose-built high-throughput chains. By targeting 100x proving efficiency improvements at L1 through state tree and VM reforms, the proposals argue that Ethereum's base layer can remain the foundation for ZK-based applications without sacrificing all execution performance to Layer 2 networks. The backward compatibility design preserves the value of approximately $100 billion in existing deployed smart contract code, which represents Ethereum's most durable competitive advantage over newer chains that lack this legacy ecosystem. Traders and investors can track ETH price dynamics and Ethereum ecosystem developments in real time through BYDFi's trading infrastructure and market data tools.