As the blockchain ecosystem develops and matures, interoperability and interconnectivity will become increasingly important. Virtual Machines (VMs) play a big role in this. A VM is a computer that may run on a blockchain and allow blockchain-specific smart contracts to interact with one another. A smart contract is an agreement expressed as code and executed on the blockchain. Different blockchains have different languages for writing smart contracts, as long as we’re talking about, for instance, Ethereum versus NEO. Even on Ethereum itself, we can write in different languages: Solidity or Vyper.
We need VMs to allow smart contracts written in one language to run another blockchain to run smart contracts on various blockchains. This saves time and costs compared to rewriting and testing new smart contracts or requiring developers to learn a new language. It works like this as long as the VMs are identical, e.g., EVM used in Ethereum and Polygon. There is no cross-VM compatibility, so if we have a different VM, we also have other native byte-code compilers, so a different set of instructions at the level of the language in which we write.
If a dApp developer launches an app on a leading public blockchain platform after months of research and coding, they may want to consider moving the dApp to another blockchain platform. VMs give developers access to different networks to create smart contracts and dApps.
Ethereum Virtual Machine is the most popular and widely used VM, supporting various dApps. EVM is integrated into every Ethereum full node and responsible for deploying smart contracts written in code compiled to EVM bytecode. This acts to isolate the machine code from the rest of the network and its filesystem, with each node running instances with identical instruction sets.
What are the benefits of EVM for developers and blockchain businesses? Keep on reading to find out.
Ethereum Virtual Machine can run complex smart contracts without any worry about how they interact with each other. This allows developers to write a smart contract once and run it on multiple platforms, creating a single contract that runs on multiple computing environments for greater efficiency and time savings.
EVM is designed to write smart contracts as well as run decentralized applications (DApps), which are software programs that run on distributed networks. EVM makes it easy for developers to write stateful contracts as well.
They can not only write applications but also easily integrate smart contracts with the fronted in the form of DApps using the API set shared by the customer.
This leads us to one more important EVM feature. The possibility of implementing the app across various clients that later form a decentralized network.
Ethereum Virtual Machines gives smart contracts access to all of Ethereum’s states at any given time, allowing for processing to happen deterministically and providing more guarantees about contract correctness. For example, one cannot make an infinite loop in EVM by calling the same function twice, and it would stop executing and return a finite value.
Turing completeness is a concept relating to a set of data manipulation rules. In computer science, this means that the set of rules can realize all the functions in the Turing machine model. It’s worth noting that smart contracts in blockchain 2.0, including EVM and Solidity, are Turing complete, but Bitcoin’s ledger transactions – which are executed in scripts and Bitcoin’s scripting language – are not Turing complete.
As a highly functional platform, the Ethereum Virtual Machine can solve most problems due to its extensibility. Moreover, since smart contracts are non-tamperable by nature, they are reliable in terms of its operating results. Every user has to act according to the same logic or principle, and the operation results will also be sent to the blockchain for permanent storage.
EVM allows for the deployment of additional functionalities within a blockchain ecosystem, thereby ensuring users face minimal issues when operating within a distributed ledger environment. If any smart contracts operating within the network contain bugs or malware, the base protocol remains unaffected, allowing for high operational security and privacy.
Ethereum Virtual Machine can execute untrusted code without putting the data at risk. Ethereum’s architecture guarantees that its computations won’t interfere with anything else happening in the system or with the user’s personal files.
Because the network needs to reach a consensus at any given time, it’s involved in a pretty complicated process. That way, the EVM system becomes more robust against failures of individual nodes, so you can update several nodes simultaneously without worrying that they might end up disagreeing with each other because of how the code was written.
The Ethereum platform is designed to allow for distributed consensus, in which everyone holds the same copy of a program but runs it on their own machine.
In the near future, the speed and ability of the Ethereum Virtual Machine will increase as much as PCs did in the 1990s. However, that development comes with several challenges. The network throughput and transaction speed are issues plaguing Ethereum. Currently, it’s the focal point for the development community, and solutions are being advanced to solve these problems. If Ethereum is really to live up to its promise of revolutionizing how we interact and transact with each other, it will be due to improvements made to its virtual machine.
