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

Offchain Labs, the core developer of Arbitrum, has publicly challenged Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's proposal to adopt RISC-V as the instruction set architecture (ISA) for Ethereum's L1 execution layer, arguing that WebAssembly (WASM) offers better long-term advantages.

The core of Offchain Labs' argument is the distinction between a "delivery ISA" (dISA) for uploading contracts and a "proving ISA" (pISA) used by ZK virtual machines, asserting these do not need to be the same. They demonstrate this by using WASM for Arbitrum's Stylus contracts, which are then ZK-proven by compiling to RISC-V.

Furthermore, the researchers caution that enshrining RISC-V on L1 risks locking Ethereum into a potentially obsolete proving technology, noting the rapid evolution of ZK-VMs. They advocate for WASM due to its structured design, ease of optimization, mature tooling, and inherent type safety, positioning it as an ideal intermediate "Internet Protocol for smart contracts."

(Source：The Block)