Tezos Gets a New Engine: RISC-V and the Future of Smart Rollups

Tezos is enhancing its smart rollup framework by integrating RISC-V, an open-source instruction set architecture, alongside its existing WebAssembly (WASM) engine. This dual-engine approach is designed to support faster, cheaper, and more flexible Layer 2 applications—especially those requiring high verifiability and computational precision. RISC-V’s modularity and openness give Tezos a long-term edge in performance and developer flexibility.

Key Ideas

RISC-V Enables Advanced Verifiability and Gas Precision: Compared to WASM, RISC-V offers superior capabilities for generating fraud proofs and tracking gas usage at the VM level. This makes it ideal for computation-heavy or security-critical smart rollups.
Open-Source Architecture Future-Proofs Tezos Development: Unlike proprietary instruction sets (e.g., x86, ARM), RISC-V allows Tezos to make independent engineering decisions, improving auditability, reducing licensing costs, and enabling long-term innovation.

Why It Matters?

The integration allows to use RISC-V for the core logic of smart rollups that require precise computation or fraud-proof generation. This could be paired with WASM for high-level application logic to optimize performance and verifiability.