Overview
- EIP-7864 would replace the hexary keccak Merkle Patricia Tree with a binary, paged state tree, producing roughly 4x shorter Merkle branches and lowering verification bandwidth for light clients.
- The paged layout groups 64–256 adjacent storage slots (about 2–8 KB), enabling cheaper loads and potential savings of more than 10,000 gas for contracts that read early storage slots.
- Buterin urges evaluating faster hash functions such as BLAKE3 or Poseidon variants to accelerate proving, with estimated gains of about 3x and up to 100x respectively pending security review.
- A proposed vectorized math precompile for the current EVM would speed 32- and 64-bit list operations common in hashes and STARK validation by roughly 8–64x.
- Longer term, he sketches a three-stage shift to a RISC-V-based VM—precompiles first, then deployable contracts, then the EVM as a compatibility contract—citing state and VM layers as over 80% of proving costs and noting VM changes remain under discussion.