Why RISC-V + Blockchain is the conversation I’ve been waiting to have

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

There are rarely times in technology where two open ecosystems simply fall into place. Yet here I am, feeling like the broker between two of these 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 is now part of the world’s critical infrastructure. Across the public and private sectors, leading institutions are deploying it at scale to ensure trust, efficiency and resilience. Some of my favorite examples include:

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

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

• World Bank Fund Chain: Monitoring of public funds in real time for more than 250 development projects in more than 10 countries.

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

These are not isolated pilots. These are examples of how blockchain is becoming the backbone for reliable exchange of data and value.

By Lancelot Hu, Director of Product Marketing | Silicon Movement 10/15/2025

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Today the emphasis is not on Why blockchain, but on how to develop it responsibly. Privacy is an essential part of this conversation. Financial institutions face strict regulatory requirements to protect customer data and trading activities. Governments must protect citizen records while ensuring their auditability.

For digital assets, tokenized money, and verifiable data to achieve mainstream adoption, blockchains must provide this privacy in large-scale, high-performance deployments. Current solutions make this a complex proposition.

Privacy barriers are cryptographically difficult to design and even more difficult to implement, especially in high-throughput environments. To achieve efficiency and meet 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 the RISC-V Summit North America 2025 this month, I will discuss how collaboration between our communities can streamline the development and deployment of privacy-focused blockchain applications.

What does RISC-V offer to blockchain?

The openness and simplicity of RISC-V have made it a magnet for hardware innovation, and I imagine the majority of the talks you’ll hear at this year’s summit will focus on the journey from design to release to tape, and what happens once RISC-V is delivered in hardware.

But RISC-V’s role in blockchain doesn’t involve silicon. Blockchain platforms traditionally run smart contracts on specialized virtual machines with bespoke instruction sets, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Earlier this year, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, discussed a long-term exploratory idea to one day replace EVM with RISC-V. This was a conceptual discussion rather than a concrete roadmap, but it is 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 they were running on a physical RISC-V processor, all within the VM context of the blockchain.

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

A virtualized and open execution target

Using the RISC-V instruction set as a virtualized and open execution target, developers can create a common virtual machine language for zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) – an optional but increasingly important part of the blockchain model. ZKPs redefine what is possible in privacy and scale on-chain by enabling auditable and verifiable calculation for all parties and markets. Simply put, they allow one party to prove to another that a certain calculation was performed correctly without revealing sensitive inputs, counterparts, or intermediate states of that calculation. This approach promises to improve privacy in applications such as financial transactions and supply chain settlement, while improving scalability through more efficient computation.

Today, developers must do significant and tedious work to write practically efficient code to generate and verify ZKPs. This difficulty has hindered blockchain adoption because there simply aren’t enough skilled developers to do this work. Efficient zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) could significantly reduce the difficulty. Developers could simply provide code as input to the zkVM and receive as output programs that calculated and verified zero-knowledge proofs of the execution of the code provided as input.

Since Buterin’s proposal, more and more teams have built RISC-V-based zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) that compile everyday programs to run on RISC-V, then produce cryptographic proof that the program worked correctly. To give a concrete example, a developer at a bank can now write transaction settlement logic in any language they know, compile it frictionlessly for RISC-V, and run it in a zkVM blockchain, 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. Although zkVMs are not new to cryptographers, RISC-V makes them accessible.

Finding common ground

The growing interest in RISC-V opens the door for deeper collaboration between the open development efforts of LF Decentralized Trust and RISC-V International. As blockchain networks increasingly enter production in enterprise and government environments, opportunities for shared innovation in performance, security, and interoperability are rapidly increasing. Our global communities, both housed 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 expertise in architecture design, performance, and, increasingly, side-channel-aware engineering, while the blockchain and decentralized technology communities provide deep experience in cryptography, distributed systems, and formal verification of critical software.

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

Register for the RISC-V Summit here.

See also:

Blockchain and IoT: securing the future of connected devices