PANews March 2 News: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on social media outlining the Ethereum execution layer roadmap, focusing on two major changes: the state tree and the virtual machine. Regarding the state tree, Vitalik supports upgrading the current hexadecimal Merkle Patricia tree to a binary tree based on a more efficient hash function through EIP-7864. This change can reduce Merkle branch length by four times, lowering client verification bandwidth costs; at the same time, the hash function can be replaced with Blake3 or Poseidon series, significantly improving proof efficiency. The binary tree design will also group storage slots into “pages,” reducing access costs for adjacent storage, saving over 10,000 Gas per transaction in many DeFi applications. Additionally, the binary tree structure is simpler and reserves metadata bits for future state expiration features.
On the virtual machine side, Vitalik proposes a long-term direction to replace the EVM, potentially adopting a RISC-V architecture. The new VM must meet four goals: higher raw execution efficiency to eliminate most precompiles; better proof efficiency than EVM; support for client-side generation of ZK proofs; and maximum simplification of code implementation. He notes that if Ethereum remains at the “EVM + GPU” level, it is “good enough,” but a better VM can make the protocol more powerful. The deployment roadmap consists of three steps: first, the new VM will replace precompiles; then, users will be allowed to deploy contracts based on the new VM; finally, the EVM will be retired, replaced by smart contracts written for the new VM, achieving full backward compatibility.
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