Ethereum Founder Suggests Radical Shift to Rescue Network Performance
Ethereum is staring down stiff competition, and co-founder Vitalik Buterin has a radical idea to keep the network in the race: rethink the very codebase that powers smart contracts.
Instead of sticking with the familiar Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Buterin is proposing a shift to RISC-V—a flexible, open-source instruction set architecture more commonly found in hardware development.
This potential move isn’t just a technical curiosity; Buterin sees it as a strategic response to Ethereum’s current limits. With next-gen chains like Solana and Sui outperforming Ethereum on speed and throughput, and investor confidence dipping, a dramatic change may be the only way forward. He argues that upgrading Ethereum’s execution layer with RISC-V could supercharge performance, especially for zero-knowledge applications and future-proofing block production mechanisms.
While the consensus layer is on track for simplification via innovations like beam chains, the execution layer, Buterin warns, remains a bottleneck. RISC-V could offer the low-level efficiency and flexibility Ethereum needs to scale—potentially unlocking 100-fold improvements in computational performance.
READ MORE:
DOGE Hits $0.1550 Wall, SHIB Whales Accumulate 874B, BlockDAG X1 Miner Tops 1M Users & $215M Presale
But it’s not just the tech that’s under pressure. Ethereum’s economics are weakening. Transaction fee revenues have plummeted, with some weeks generating as little as 3 ETH in blob fees—down to roughly $5,000—despite once being a major source of income for the network. By April 2025, the average cost of a transaction had fallen to just $0.16, levels not seen since 2020.
Behind the drop is a shift in user behavior. Instead of executing simple transactions on the base layer, users are flocking to layer-2 ecosystems or relying on smart contracts, bypassing Ethereum’s traditional fee model. As a result, layer-2 networks—though essential for reducing costs—are now eating into Ethereum’s core revenue.
Some market watchers believe this trend is hurting more than helping. As fees dry up and questions emerge about Ethereum’s long-term competitiveness, Ether’s price has taken a hit, with projections suggesting a potential slide toward $1,100 if sentiment continues to deteriorate.
Buterin’s call for a deeper architectural overhaul may be Ethereum’s attempt to reset the playing field—before performance, revenue, and relevance slip even further.
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
