Why RISC-V + Blockchain Is the Conversation I’ve Been Waiting to Have 

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The open RISC-V ISA has always been about freedom and flexibility in hardware design. Now a compelling new use case gives developers a software-only abstraction layer, taking privacy and flexibility to new heights. 

There are rarely moments in technology when two open ecosystems simply ‘click’ into place. Yet here I am, feeling like the officiant between two such entities: the open hardware standard RISC-V, and the shared, immutable digital ledger that is blockchain.  

Blockchain is no longer an experiment or a buzzword; it’s becoming part of the world’s critical infrastructure. Across both the public and private sectors, leading institutions are deploying it at scale to deliver trust, efficiency, and resilience. Some of my favorite examples include: 

• Citi Token Services: Using tokenized deposits and smart contracts to enable faster, programmable settlement. 

• The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC): Re-architecting post-trade and collateral management with blockchain to streamline securities markets. 

• World Bank FundsChain: Tracing public funds in real time across more than 250 development projects in 10+ countries. 

• Brazil’s National Civil Identity Card (CIN): Modernizing the national identification system with blockchain technology to reduce fraud and simplify access to public services. 

These aren’t isolated pilots. They’re examples of how blockchain is becoming the backbone of trusted data and value exchange. 

The focus today is not on why blockchain, but on how to scale it responsibly. Privacy is a critical part of that conversation. Financial institutions face strict regulatory requirements to safeguard client data and trading activity. Governments must protect citizen records while ensuring auditability. 

For digital assets, tokenized money, and verifiable data to reach mainstream adoption, blockchains must deliver this privacy across large-scale, high-performance deployments. Today’s solutions make that a complex proposition. 

The barriers to privacy are cryptographically challenging to design and even harder to implement, especially in high-throughput environments. To achieve the efficiency and scale the market demands, we need to find simpler and better ways to bring privacy and portability to the blockchain industry. 

Using RISC-V as a smart contract compiler presents a new and exciting potential approach. At RISC-V Summit North America 2025 this month, I’ll discuss how collaboration between our communities can streamline development and deployment of privacy-focused blockchain applications. 

What does RISC-V offer blockchain? 

RISC-V’s openness and simplicity has made it a magnet for hardware innovation, and I imagine the majority of the talks you’ll hear at this year’s summit will discuss the journey from design to tapeout, and what happens once RISC-V delivers in hardware form. 

But RISC-V’s role in blockchain doesn’t involve silicon. Blockchain platforms traditionally execute smart contracts on specialized virtual machines with bespoke instruction sets, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Earlier this year, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote about a long-term, exploratory idea to one day replace the EVM with RISC-V. This was a conceptual discussion rather than a concrete roadmap, but one that’s important for the RISC-V community to pay attention to. 

In theory, this approach would treat RISC-V as a software-only abstraction layer. Contracts could be written in familiar languages, then compiled and executed as if running on a physical RISC-V processor, all within the blockchain’s VM context. 

From a long-term strategic standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. RISC-V is a clean, minimal instruction set that’s easier to model and prove than many legacy VMs. It has only a modest number of instructions, and omits complex, multi-step operations in favor of efficient, orthogonal primitives that map well to blockchain’s arithmetic constraints. And its shared open ethos means that developers can tap into a rich ecosystem of existing tools such as industry-grade compilers, debuggers, and formal verification tools for smart contracts. 

A virtualized, open execution target 

By using the RISC-V instruction set as a virtualized, open execution target, developers can create a common VM language for zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) – an optional yet increasingly important part of the blockchain model. ZKPs redefine what’s possible for privacy and scale on-chain by enabling auditable, verifiable compute for all parties and markets. Simply put, they allow one party to prove to another that a certain computation was performed correctly without revealing the sensitive inputs, counterparties or intermediate states of that computation. This approach promises to enhance privacy in applications like financial transactions and supply chain settlement, while also boosting scalability through more efficient computation. 

Today, developers have to do a large amount of difficult and tedious work to write practically efficient code for generating and verifying ZKPs. This difficulty has hindered blockchain adoption as there just aren’t enough knowledgeable developers to do this work. Efficient zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) could dramatically reduce the difficulty. Developers could just provide code as input to the zkVM and receive as output programs that computed and verified zero knowledge proofs of the code execution provided as input. 

Since Buterin’s proposal, more and more teams have been building RISC-V based zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) that compile everyday programs down to run on RISC-V and then produce a cryptographic proof that the program ran correctly. To give a real-world example, a developer at a bank can now write transaction settlement logic in whatever language they know, frictionlessly compile it for RISC-V and run it in a blockchain zkVM, avoiding the steep learning curve of languages like Ethereum’s Solidity. This significantly lowers the barrier to entry and could accelerate the development of blockchain applications. While zkVMs aren’t anything new to cryptographers, RISC-V makes them accessible. 

Finding common ground  

The growing interest in RISC-V opens the door to deeper collaboration between the open development efforts of LF Decentralized Trust and RISC-V International. As blockchain networks increasingly move into production across corporate and government environments, opportunities for shared innovation around performance, security, and interoperability are expanding rapidly. Our global communities, both hosted under the Linux Foundation, live and breathe collaborative development and governance, making this alignment, I believe, both natural and timely. 

The RISC-V community brings decades of craft in architecture design, performance, and increasingly, side-channel-aware engineering, while the blockchain and decentralized tech communities offer deep experience in cryptography, distributed systems, and formal verification of critical software. 

Together, we have the skillset to co-develop open reference implementations, formal specs for zkVMs, and the building blocks that will make private-by-default apps easier to build and faster to run. That’s the beauty of an open ISA: evolution can happen across layers, in the open, with everyone granted an equal seat at the table. 

Register for the RISC-V Summit here. 

See also: 

Blockchain and IoT: Securing the Future of Connected Devices 

How Blockchain is Enabling Trust and Transparency in IoT Ecosystems 

China Unyielding Ascent in RISC-V 

RISC-V Royalty-Driven Revenue to Exceed License Revenue by 2027 

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