Vitalik Buterin Proposes EIP7864 Binary State Tree and RISC-V VM Roadmap for Ethereum

Vitalik Buterin proposed a major overhaul of Ethereum's core architecture, calling for a shift from the current hexadecimal Keccak Merkle Patricia state tree to a binary structure under EIP7864 and evaluating Blake3 or Poseidon as new hash functions, according to a March 1 post on X. The proposal effectively sidelines Verkle Trees as the preferred option for a planned 2026 hard fork following mid-2024 concerns over their elliptic curve cryptography's vulnerability to quantum computing threats. Buterin also outlined a longer-term plan to replace the EVM with a RISC-V-based virtual machine, starting with precompiled contracts on the new VM, then allowing direct contract deployment alongside the EVM, and ultimately rewriting the EVM as a smart contract to preserve backward compatibility. Offchain Labs, core developer of Arbitrum, has publicly opposed RISC-V as the main smart contract format, advocating instead for WebAssembly at the contract layer while compiling to RISC-V for ZK proofs, and has already implemented such a prototype on Arbitrum.