Linea has announced it will migrate to the RISC-V architecture to improve performance.

Linea Shifts to RISC-V Architecture, Ditching EVM Arithmetization

Ethereum Layer 2 project Linea is making a big architectural shift. The team announced it's moving to RISC-V.

For the past three years, Linea used a direct arithmetization approach to the EVM. It worked—the network launched on mainnet and became a reference point. But there was a catch: every Ethereum hard fork forced the team to rewrite constraint modules. The complexity was eating up too much development time.

With RISC-V, the instruction set drops from EVM's complexity down to around 40 instructions. Provers spin up faster, and Type-1 compatibility is there from day one.

Linea noted that the Ethereum Foundation is already leaning into RISC-V—a clear signal for where the Ethereum proving layer is headed. The project will keep its constraint language (zkC), its proof aggregation stack (Vortex and Arcane), and its formal verification capabilities. What it gains? True modularity, a stack the community can actually audit, and zero reliance on critical third parties.