Linea announces it will switch to the RISC-V architecture to optimize performance.

On March 30th, Linea, an Ethereum Layer 2 project, announced its transition to the RISC-V architecture. For the past three years, Linea had employed a direct arithmetic implementation of the EVM. Although this method was successfully deployed on the mainnet and set an industry standard, every Ethereum hard fork necessitated a rewrite of the constraint module, demanding significant effort from the development team to manage complexity. The adoption of RISC-V simplifies the instruction set from the EVM's complexity to around 40 instructions, leading to quicker prover initialization and immediate Type-1 compatibility. Linea indicated that the Ethereum Foundation's work on RISC-V provides clarity on the future development path for Ethereum's proof layer. Linea will maintain its zkC constraint language, Vortex and Arcane proof aggregation stacks, and formal verification functionalities. This transition will also bring benefits such as a genuinely modular and community-auditable stack, along with the elimination of critical third-party dependencies.