Ewasm: Where We Are and Where We Are Going
In 2015, Ethereum was launched, and since has grown into one of the most important blockchains today at the level of use case development. The idea behind Ethereum was to create a “decentralized world computer”.
Since its launch, the development of decentralized applications has allowed the use of blockchain technology to be extrapolated to real life use cases that include everything from finance to metaverses.
However, the exponential growth experienced in the last five years has shown that the network was not technically prepared to house this huge ecosystem built around it.
The consequences have been evident over the last five years: exorbitant transaction fees, network congestion and a rigid architecture that has revealed its inability to operate under the demands of Web3 in times of high demand.
Fortunately, as part of the evolution of blockchain technology and the most important network of dApps in the industry, Ethereum has undergone substantial improvements in recent years at the development level that have made it possible to overcome these difficulties, while transitioning to a proof-of-stake (POS) consensus mechanism to achieve the scalability needed.
Among the improvements on this projected roadmap we have Ewasm, an Ethereum-flavored virtual machine under which Ethereum as a blockchain network is expected to allow its consensus protocol to be changed at the root, and at the same time the architecture of its virtual machine for the deployment of applications at the decentralized level.
But what is Ewasm?
On Ethereum, smart contracts are deployed through its virtual machine called the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), an architecture that is currently rigid and only supports low-performance programming languages such as Solidity.
The solution is the flexible, high performance Ewasm, WebAssembly optimized for the Ethereum Network. Ewasm ensures Ethereum compatibility when migrating Ethereum dApps to high performance blockchains, replacing the current Ethereum virtual machine. Ewasm advances on EVM by upgrading Ethereum smart contracts to near-native speed.
WebAssembly (abbreviated, Wasm) is a new industry standard with which web developers can generate applications on the internet. This new method promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has come to replace the use of JavaScript, which is relatively slow.
With the support of the world’s leading computer hardware manufacturers, operating systems, and development languages, Wasm is used in next-generation public blockchains such as Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, and Oasis, among others, which have chosen WebAssembly as the virtual machine architecture to interact with their dApps.
However, most WebAssembly virtual machines are not compatible with EVM applications currently running on Ethereum, preventing most developers from running new blockchain applications on next-generation networks.
In order to solve this problem, the Ethereum Foundation proposed the WebAssembly-flavored Ethereum virtual machine, better known as Ewasm, in order to be able to deploy EVM applications on next-generation blockchains.
Employing this technological solution, Ewasm and EVM share the same account and data structure, providing compatible RPC Web3 interfaces for external applications.
Ethereum’s current situation
Over the past two years, a number of major updates to the Ethereum blockchain have been proposed.
As part of its upgrade to ETH 2.0 (Serenity), Ethereum has gone through various phases, and is currently carrying out the implementation of Shard Chains (Phase 1), according to its proposed roadmap.
It is expected that in the third phase (Phase 2), the new virtual machine Ethereum-flavored WebAssembly (eWASM) will be implemented on the public blockchain. According to Consensys, the forecast is that this third phase will be completed by 2022.
This virtual machine is based on Web Assembly and defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an open source standard. Because WASM supports multiple coding languages, eWASM could allow the execution of smart contracts written in any language in Ethereum, rather than just those written in Solidity, as the current EVM provides. Shard Chains, which have limited functionality in Phase 1, are transformed into fully functional transactional chains, capable of scaling the Ethereum network.
Ewasm: Alternative options to Ethereum
The Ewasm specification consists of a subset of WebAssembly components suitable for Ethereum needs, namely determinism and relevant features. It also includes a number of system smart contracts that provide access to the features of the Ethereum platform.
The advantages of Ewasm are quite explicit: faster execution speed, improved hardware support, superior support for existing tools, language portability, and access to the large community of the WebAssembly ecosystem.
The Ewasm project aims for backward compatibility by also supporting the current opcode instruction set and including transcompile options in its specifications, beyond allowing new smart contracts to be written in high-level languages like Rust, Go, etc.
Currently many blockchain platforms are being configured to offer EVM compatibility by implementing Ethereum-flavored WebAssembly (Ewasm) technology, either by incorporation into their architecture or through third-party providers.
From ParaState to Moonbeam, solutions for migrating smart contracts are gradually beginning to emerge within the Polkadot ecosystem, and most are written in Solidity, the native language of Ethereum
Among the most prominent ones we find ParaState. ParaState presents its SSVM-Ewasm Substrate pallet with the aim of offering dApps developers both in Ethereum and external networks that seek to benefit from its ecosystem, optimized performance at the lowest cost.
With SSVM-Ewasm Substrate, developers of decentralized applications will be able to write smart contracts using native Ethereum languages (such as Solidity and Fe); as well as in more than 20 programming languages within the LLVM standard.
With this technological solution, ParaState becomes the only multi-chain platform in the blockchain ecosystem offering a VM that allows the use of multiple programming languages to write smart contracts compatible with Ethereum, and run them faster with Polkadot; leaving behind the inherent problems of scalability (high transaction fees/low speeds).
The future: Ethereum without Solidity?
The implementation of Ewasm on Ethereum seems to be an imminent reality. The advantages around this technology in creating a highly scalable virtual machine with programming properties in high-level languages are the perfect recipe to guarantee the sustainability of the blockchain industry under the Web3 scheme.
The move to Ethereum 2 will have vast implications for its scalability, security, decentralization, and economics. Throughputs of around 10,000 transactions per second are anticipated, and the abandoning of proof-of-work could improve the decentralization and carbon footprint of the network by greatly reducing the amount of computational work that validators must perform.
The eWasm will be a new EVM, which will allow smart contracts to be written in any programming language and not just Solidity, as is currently the case with Ethereum.
The implications behind this are important, as it will allow more developers to write smart contracts in programming languages that they are already familiar with.
The result could be staggering for the industry, increasing the number of developers joining Ethereum to develop new decentralized applications, in high-level languages other than Solidity.
Nevertheless, ParaState is holding a two-month hackathon Oct.16th 21: 00 ET to Dec.15th 21: 00 ET. This event is co-organized with DoraHacks and will provide a total of 100,000 US dollars in rewards with tasks developers can complete and submit online.
Project submission link: https://hackerlink.io/en/grant/Parastate/1
About ParaState
Known as Ethereum on steroids, ParaState is a multi-chain smart contract platform bridging the application and developer ecosystem between Polkadot, Substrate and Ethereum, as well as other chains wanting to provide Ethereum compatibility. While supporting the EVM pallet to provide seamless compatibility with all existing Ethereum applications, ParaState also provides developers with a next-gen smart contract implementation environment, Ethereum-flavored WebAssembly. These two infrastructures are ensured to talk to each other and share the same account system on ParaState.
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