Back from snowy and sunny Denver. It was great to see a number of readers there. For this month’s deep dive, Denis looks at the EVM ecosystem and how it might evolve outside of the Ethereum network. Also check out DXdao’s bounties for the ongoing Codeless Hackathon.
– Chris
When thinking in DeFi years, Ethereum has already reached legacy status. It survived its first wave of “Ethereum killers”, followed by a surge in popularity of low cost chains (Polygon, BSC, Fantom) running the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). And now, after launching with limited success, these same Ethereum killers are integrating the EVM and racing to enter the multichain world. Specifically, Polkadot has added Moonbeam, Near – Aurora, and soon (announced but not yet launched), Evmos will be on Cosmos and Neon on Solana.
When these chains were first launched (without EVM compatibility), they claimed to have superior designs, with features such as popular programming-language support and speed. As these chains begin to support EVM, it now seems they’re less bullish about the advantages of their own technology, and instead realize the need to support Ethereum’s. By doing so, these chains are backtracking on their original vision to build an alternative tech stack to Ethereum’s. Here, we’ll take a look at the different architectures and how emerging standards around EVM across blockchains will create more composability. Plus, we see the resulting chain-specific ecosystems becoming a hot-bed for product experimentation.
Think of EVM as a computer that calculates the results of operational outputs of smart contracts, given certain inputs. A copy of EVM runs on each node – it’s imperative to remember that it’s not located in one single place. EVM is also referred to as “a runtime” or “an environment”.
In addition to this runtime, there are some important instruments built around EVM, which are highlighted in red below.
EVM takes in programs written in Solidity language, and to make the language more powerful, a number of “libraries” were created. Developer tools such as Truffle or Hardhat make the writing and testing of smart contracts much easier. Also, because we’re talking about networked environments, outside wallets connect to the EVM via API libraries such as Web3.js.
And among those tools more familiar to the average user, there’s the powerful blockchain explorer Etherscan. It knows how to look into thousands of transactions and present them in a human-readable way. Plus, there’s the MetaMask wallet, which connects users to EVM by broadcasting their commands over a network.
It took thousands of hours for hundreds of highly-skilled developers to build these tools and infrastructure. The difference in time taken between creating a dApp with mature tools and unpolished ones can be 100:1 in some cases. That’s why the build-out of tools and infrastructure by proprietary stack blockchains is moving extremely slowly by industry…
Read More: doseofdefi.substack.com