A proposal has emerged within the Ethereum community to hard-fork the network and replace the modexp precompile with native code, potentially written in a new virtual machine such as RISC-V. The suggestion aims to address the significant challenges and near-miss consensus failures associated with the current modexp implementation. Although this change could result in a performance hit for existing applications using modexp, the number of such users is reportedly small. The proposal highlights the complexity and inefficiencies in building Ethereum implementations, which currently require extensive custom optimizations due to numerous corner cases.