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The Ethereum Foundation is considering a new virtual machine for the $ETH network as part of a preliminary roadmap Vitalik Buterin is calling "Lean Ethereum." Buterin has identified leanISA and RISC-V as the leading candidates for that new execution environment.
The proposal, framed as a strawmap — a working draft circulated for discussion rather than a finalized plan — puts protocol-level architecture at the center of the Foundation's stated goals of making Ethereum more private and scalable.
The Virtual Machine Question At the technical core of the Lean Ethereum initiative sits a choice the Foundation has not yet made: which virtual machine should underpin future Ethereum execution.
The two candidates Buterin named are leanISA, a purpose-built instruction set aimed at minimalism, and RISC-V, an open-standard reduced instruction set architecture that originated in academic computer science and has since found broad industrial adoption.
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