Vitalik Proposes Major Reforms to Ethereum State Tree and Virtual Machine

On March 1, Vitalik Buterin proposed two major reforms for Ethereum's state tree and virtual machine on X. Regarding the state tree, he suggested replacing the current six-branch Keccak Merkle Patricia tree with a simpler binary tree via EIP-7864, and switching to Blake3 or Poseidon hash functions to improve efficiency. For the virtual machine, he proposed replacing the EVM with a RISC-V architecture and outlined a three-step plan to achieve backward compatibility. This proposal sparked controversy, with the Arbitrum development team advocating for WebAssembly (WASM) as the contract delivery format. Vitalik stated that Ethereum will undergo multiple deep technical upgrades in the future; the state tree reform has entered the implementation phase, while the virtual machine replacement is still at the roadmap stage.