At @formalland.bsky.social we are specialist of compilers and formal verification, and we will be happy to help building faster execution engine for smart contracts.

Thanks for the reading!

This will surely optimize some computations, but others, such as Keccak hashes, would still take as much time. So there is a debate about whether it is worth the cost, or whether there are better targets than RISC-V.

The proposal to migrate to RISC-V would keep CALL, CREATE, and the "storage" functions as special primitives but replace all the arithmetic/stack/memory opcodes with corresponding RISC-V ones.

The most complex opcodes are related to contract calls and creation, such as CALL and CREATE. They are the way to interact with other contracts and have complex rules, for example, for error handling. What to do if there is not enough gas? Not enough money? A revert?

Other primitives of the EVM include cryptographic primitives for hashes and signatures. Some of these are implemented through "precompiles", which are like sys-calls to some special hard-coded primitives. 💪

Generally, the access keys are computed with the Keccak hash algorithm.

This hashing is one of the bottlenecks to migrate to ZK platforms, as it is really expensive to compute in ZK, unless replaced by ZK-friendly hashes like Poseidon2.

You have access to a "storage" which is preserved after the contract's execution. You can view it as the smart contract's hard drive 💾. It is a mapping from 256-bit words to 256-bit words. It costs money to write in it, as its state must be replicated on all the network nodes.

A smart contract might terminate either with success or failure (RETURN or REVERT opcode). In both cases, you specify a memory range acting as the returned value. If there is a REVERT, the program is rejected from the blockchain and does not modify/pay anything. 👌

You have all the arithmetic and bitwise operations you might expect, operating generally on 256-bit words. You never de-allocate, as smart contract executions are short-lived! 🏎️

It works with a stack (no registers). The default word size is 256 bits (32 bytes!). When executing a smart contract, you have access to a "memory" that is an array of bytes, similar to the RAM memory for native programs.

This is the assembly language to which smart contracts written in Solidity are compiled. You can see the complete list of opcodes on evm.codes There are about 150 of them.