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Offchain Labs challenges Vitalik's RISC-V proposal, says WASM better for Ethereum L1 - The Block

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Originally published on Google News - RISC-V

AI Analysis

Offchain Labs publicly contested Vitalik Buterin's suggestion regarding the next-generation execution environment for Ethereum Layer 1.
The challenge advocates for WebAssembly (WASM) over RISC-V as the preferred Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) standard for blockchain execution.
Offchain Labs’ position is likely influenced by their experience running high-throughput Layer 2 execution environments, often leveraging WASM or similar efficient architectures.
The decision between WASM and RISC-V will dictate the technical direction and tooling ecosystem for future fundamental Ethereum upgrades.

RISC-V: An open and standardized Instruction Set Architecture favored for its clean design and potential for high efficiency and eventual hardware acceleration.
WASM (WebAssembly): A portable binary instruction format designed as a high-performance compilation target, offering near-native execution speed, robust sandboxing, and wide support across modern web infrastructure and programming languages.
EVM Context: The debate concerns evolving the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to improve efficiency, security, and developer experience; both technologies are candidates to either replace or significantly augment the existing EVM.
Offchain Labs implicitly favors WASM's existing maturity and developer familiarity over the structural benefits of adopting a newer ISA like RISC-V for core protocol stability.

For Ethereum: Choosing WASM would leverage mature tooling and established programming language support, potentially accelerating the development and adoption of new L1 features and smart contract languages.
For RISC-V Ecosystem: Non-adoption by Ethereum L1 represents a significant missed opportunity for RISC-V to secure a critical foothold in the foundational decentralized ledger market, which would drive vast amounts of specialized development and hardware optimization.
For WebAssembly: If adopted by Ethereum L1, WASM would solidify its dominance as the execution standard not just for web browsers and Layer 2 solutions, but for the most prominent decentralized computing platforms globally, validating its design for secure and performant sandbox environments.