Vitalik Buterin Targets Ethereum’s Core Bottlenecks with Bold Overhaul

Vitalik Buterin has shifted the scaling conversation away from Layer 2 and back to Ethereum’s core, arguing that the network’s state tree and virtual machine are the biggest long-term constraints. He says those two components account for more than 80% of proving costs and identifies them as the main bottlenecks to efficient zero-knowledge proving.

Central to the proposal is EIP-7864, which would replace the hexary Merkle Patricia tree with a binary tree. Binary trees would produce Merkle proofs roughly four times shorter, cutting verification bandwidth, and would group storage slots into “pages” so related data can be loaded more efficiently.

Many dApps repeatedly access adjacent storage slots, a pattern the change could exploit to save more than 10,000 gas per transaction in some cases, and pairing the tree with faster hash functions could further speed proof generation. Buterin also floated a long-term move beyond the EVM toward a RISC-V–based execution engine.

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