The second largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, Ether (ETH) is popular among cryptocurrency investors due to its native ETH token. However, its native his Solidity programming language and his Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) lends itself to the praise it receives from the developer community. In fact, the Ethereum blockchain continues to attract decentralized application (DApp) developers due to its flexibility, the wide range of developer tools available, and the platform’s large user base.
Forming the core of the blockchain’s architecture, EVMs are programs that run application code or smart contracts, providing a runtime environment that runs on the Ethereum network. In addition, EVM is Turing complete, meaning it can run any program coded in any programming language, making it easy for developers in his burgeoning Web3 space to create custom smart contracts and DApps. increase.
In addition to these key features, EVM is the most powerful in existence today as it accesses all nodes in the network, handles the execution of smart contracts, and effectively handles all transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. virtual machine.
What is the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and how does it work?
Conceptualized in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum network has achieved phenomenal success as the blockchain of choice for DApp developers thanks to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) designed by Gavin Wood during his tenure at Ethereum. Thing. Written in C++ and using the LLVM project compiler, his EVM is a special state machine that runs continuously and has immutable operations that determine the state of each block in the Ethereum blockchain.
EVM not only governs what nodes can and cannot do on the distributed ledger maintained by the Ethereum blockchain, but also defines specific rules for changing state from block to block. The latter functionality is what enables the smart contract functionality that Ethereum has become known for.
To understand what the Ethereum virtual machine does, we need to consider each of the different features it offers to ensure the smooth operation of the Ethereum network. For any input it receives, EVMs are inherently deterministic and produce outputs that follow a mathematical function in the simplest sense.
The EVM, which behaves like a stack machine pushing temporary values to and from a pushdown stack, has a depth of 1024 items, each item being a 256-bit word. Also, he on the Ethereum blockchain maintains temporary memory in the form of byte arrays that change between two transactions. Compiled smart contract code is executed by EVM in the form of a collection of 140 standard opcodes, but other blockchain-specific stack operations are also implemented by his EVM.
EVM therefore has an inherently volatile machine state while processing transactions and a global or world state containing information about various accounts maintained on the Ethereum blockchain. All actions are governed by his EVM code, which has iterated itself several times since the start of the Ethereum network in 2015, with various implementations of EVM currently in use.
In fact, EVM is responsible for maintaining the level of abstraction between thousands of Ethereum nodes and running code, acting as a function of delivering consistent results without divulging too many details to clients and nodes.
What is the purpose of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)?
EVM reliably powers all applications running on the Ethereum network with no significant downtime reported. For developers, EVM serves as an umbrella program that runs small executables known as smart contracts on Ethereum, and freely writes these smart contracts in various programming languages such as Solidity, Vyper, Python, and Yul. make it possible. others.
With this flexibility provided by EVM, the Ethereum blockchain has spawned thousands of DApps in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) spaces. Each of these DApps and the smart contracts they compose are converted into bytecode that feeds the EVM and is distributed across all nodes in the Ethereum network. Once the smart contract is deployed, EVM is responsible for communicating with all nodes and performing state changes when consensus is reached.
It can be said that EVM is inserted inside every Ethereum node and uses bytecode instead of the base programming language to execute smart contracts, decoupling the physical host computer from the machine code on which Ethereum runs.
Advantages of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
The way EVM works allows developers to run their code without worrying about impacting the rest of the network or potentially sabotaging data or personal files hosted on one of the node computers. increase.
Additionally, distributed consensus can be used to execute complex smart contracts across different computing environments. This ensures that a single node failure will not adversely affect the execution of his DApps or smart contracts. This is because the EVM code remains the same on all nodes. Additionally, account data is maintained at a global level in EVM, so developers can write custom smart contract code and create their own separate DApps that can access this global dataset and generate reliable outputs. Perfect for
The resulting sanctity is what makes EVM, and the Ethereum blockchain in particular, suitable for the sustainable expansion of the DApps and smart contracts Ethereum ecosystem in general. Add to this the library of standard code for developers to choose from, the growing number of layer 2 blockchains compatible with EVMs, and the number of possible EVM use cases, which makes EVM the platform of choice. is easy to understand. For Web3 development.
Drawbacks of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
Despite the many advantages offered by EVM, there are certain drawbacks that developers and entrepreneurs building on Ethereum should consider. Chief among these are the high transaction fees or gas costs associated with running smart contracts on the Ethereum network.
These fees paid in ETH vary depending on the complexity of the contract and network congestion at runtime, so it is imperative that developers and entrepreneurs price their services accordingly. Moreover, since Solidity is the most preferred language for coding in his EVM, the developer should have sufficient experience and technical expertise to create efficient smart his contracts using Solidity. Means you must have the knowledge.
The latter is important as the additional computational requirements lead to higher gas costs and ultimately prove detrimental to project success. If developers choose to code using other languages, they must be careful in resolving inherent repetitions in their code. While it is possible to upgrade a smart contract at a later stage, there are security risks associated with creating an intermediate smart contract that references the address of the original smart contract.
The future of EVMs
Despite the revolutionary changes brought to the blockchain ecosystem by EVM, this technology for reading and executing code has been improved by many blockchain projects.
With cross-chain interoperability being the most important aspect for developers, there are many EVM-compatible blockchains underpinnings, most of which use less gas and have faster transaction speeds than the Ethereum protocol. As a result, these blockchains now interact seamlessly with his Ethereum users, using blockchain bridges to facilitate the movement of funds to his own network.
However, once the Ethereum protocol successfully completes its merge in September 2022, our next target will be to migrate from EVM to Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM). Designed to be highly modular and platform agnostic, eWASM is being touted as the next game-changer for the Ethereum protocol and could motivate other blockchains to adopt this runtime environment for smart contracts as well. There is a nature. However, whether his eWASM will replace his EVM as the most reliable mechanism for smart contracts is a matter of time.