I just reviewed the technical proposal that Vitalik Buterin recently shared, and honestly, it’s quite ambitious. The guy is proposing nothing less than redesigning two fundamental pillars of Ethereum to optimize its future.

The first is the state tree. Currently, Ethereum uses a Merkle Patricia hexary tree with keccak, but Buterin wants to replace that with a more efficient binary structure. It sounds technical, but the implications are interesting: the Merkle branches would be reduced fourfold, meaning less data to verify, lower bandwidth. If they also combine this with a better hash function like Blake3 or Poseidon, they could achieve efficiency improvements of 3x up to 100x.

EIP-7864, which is already in development with Guillaume Ballet and others, includes something clever: a page-based storage scheme that groups contiguous slots. Basically, contracts that read their first storage slots benefit from batch access instead of paying individual costs. Buterin estimates this could save over 10,000 gas per transaction in many dapps that already operate this way. That’s no small feat.

The second is more long-term but potentially more transformative: replacing the EVM with RISC-V. The logic is clear: if ZK provers already use RISC-V, why not make the virtual machine natively in that standard? A RISC-V interpreter requires only a few hundred lines of code versus the growing complexity of the EVM. The transition would be gradual: first only for precompilations, then for user contracts, and finally the EVM would be completely retired but reimplemented as a smart contract.

According to Vitalik himself, these changes account for more than 80% of the bottleneck in efficient ZK proof generation. That is, they are not cosmetic improvements but transformations that could redefine Ethereum’s future. The interesting part is that they maintain full compatibility with existing contracts, so it’s not a reset but a strategic evolution.

Of course, this takes time and requires a lot of security work before deployment, but seeing Buterin think in terms of structural optimization gives you an idea of where Ethereum’s technical vision is headed. Definitely worth following how these proposals develop.