[Vitalik Outlines Ethereum Execution Layer Roadmap, Focusing on State Trees and Virtual Machine Changes] Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a post on social media outlining the roadmap for the Ethereum execution layer, with a focus on two major changes: state trees and the virtual machine. Regarding state trees, Vitalik supports upgrading the current hexadecimal Merkle Patricia Tree to a binary tree based on a more efficient hash function through EIP-7864. This change could shorten Merkle branches by four times, reducing client verification data bandwidth costs. At the same time, the hash function could switch to Blake3 or the Poseidon series, significantly improving proof efficiency. The binary tree design would also group storage slots into "pages," lowering the access cost for adjacent storage. Many DeFi applications could save over 10,000 Gas per transaction. Additionally, the simpler binary tree structure could reserve metadata bits for future state expiry functionality. On the virtual machine side, Vitalik proposed a long-term direction of replacing the EVM, potentially adopting the RISC-V architecture. The new VM must meet four goals: higher raw execution efficiency, making most precompiles unnecessary; better proof efficiency than the EVM; support for client-side generation of ZK proofs; and maximum simplification of code implementation. He noted that while Ethereum is "sufficient" if it remains at the "EVM+GPU" level, a better VM could make the protocol much stronger. The deployment roadmap is divided into three steps: first, the new VM will replace precompiles; next, users will be allowed to deploy contracts based on the new VM; and finally, the EVM will be retired, transitioning to smart contracts written with the new VM, achieving full backward compatibility.