Vitalik's Secret Ethereum Upgrade Plan Changes Everything

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin just dropped a technical roadmap post that few people are fully digesting. It covers two of Ethereum's deepest structural changes yet. Binary state trees. And replacing the EVM itself.

He posted the full breakdown on X, laying out what he believes are the two biggest bottlenecks blocking efficient proving on Ethereum. Both of them, he said, need to be addressed head-on.

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The State Tree Nobody Talks About

The first change is EIP-7864. It switches Ethereum from its current hexary keccak Merkle Patricia Tree to a binary tree using a more efficient hash function.

That might sound dry. It isn't. According to ">Vitalik Buterin on X, the switch cuts Merkle branch sizes by 4x. That makes client-side branch verification far more affordable in terms of data bandwidth.

The hash function shift matters too. Blake3 could push proving efficiency roughly 3x over keccak. A Poseidon variant could hit 100x. Still more security work required there, Buterin noted.

Storage slot access also changes. The binary tree design groups slots into pages of 64 to 256 slots each. That's 2-8 kilobytes per page. Many existing DApps already load heavily from the first few storage slots. The result, Buterin said on X, is that this approach could save those applications over 10,000 gas per transaction.

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The state tree work is being led by developer Guillaume Ballet and others. Buterin described binary trees as an "omnibus" that applies ten years of learnings about what actually makes a good state tree.

Replacing the EVM Is the Real Bomb

This is where it gets genuinely controversial. Buterin is openly pushing for a long-term switch from the EVM to RISC-V.

He wrote on X that today's provers are already written in RISC-V. So making the new virtual machine RISC-V removes an unnecessary translation layer entirely. A RISC-V interpreter is only a few hundred lines of code, he said. That's what a blockchain virtual machine should feel like.

The proposed deployment would run in three stages. NewVM, like RISC-V, would first handle precompiles only. Around 80% of current precompiles would become blocks of NewVM code. Then users gain the ability to deploy NewVM contracts directly. Finally, the EVM itself retires and becomes a smart contract written in NewVM.

Existing users keep full backwards compatibility, except for gas cost changes. Those changes, Buterin noted, will be overshadowed by the broader scaling work happening over the next few years anyway.

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He made a point on X that carries some weight. Developers have a "latent fear" of touching the EVM. When wallet features or privacy tools can be built without it, there's a noticeable relief. That signals the EVM is failing its own purpose. Ethereum's point is generality, and if the virtual machine can't deliver that, then it needs replacing.

This is still non-consensus inside the Ethereum community. Buterin acknowledged that clearly. But he said he has high conviction it becomes the obvious path forward once the state tree changes and longer-term state roadmap work wraps up.

The vectorized math precompile he mentioned in an earlier post connects here too. Buterin described it as something like a GPU for the EVM, capable of accelerating hashes, STARK validation, FHE, and quantum-resistant signature schemes by 8 to 64 times.

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These changes together, tree and virtual machine, account for over 80% of the bottlenecks blocking efficient proving. That's the figure Buterin cited directly in his post on X. Two changes. Majority of the problem solved.