Ethereum Virtual Machine inside of Polkadot Network? It’s called Moonbeam
For anyone who is familiar with using smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain would have already know of the incredible power of a decentralized computer. Ethereum is the first widely-adopted smart contract blockchain. There are many advantages of being first.
Being first allows you to set User & Development standards. Metamask, with its injected Web3 capabilities has now become a UI/UX expectation and hence a standard for all hot wallets. OpenZeppelin with its heavily audited solidity contracts has become a standard for ERC20 and ERC721 implementations for Solidity developers. Every Solidity developer knows Remix and Truffle. Every Solidity developer has an Infura account.
Being first allows you to dominate the developer community. To my point, a simple search for Udemy courses for “Solidity” pulls up over 450 course results for the Ethereum blockchain, but a simple search for “Rust” (which is what many competing blockchains like Polkadot, Algorand are built on) pulls up only about 110 results and they are not even related to the smart contract applications!
Being first allows you to capture institutional interest. Take a look at what Goldman Sachs report interviewee says about Ethereum:
Being first allows you to capture capital for new smart contract growth industries. DEFI Pulse show an incredible rise of Decentralized Finance protocols on Ethereum’s network. No network had benefited as much as all the EVM based blockchains (BSC, Polygon Matic) combined. Everything that benefited was EVM based.
Being first also means your smart contracts get trial by fire. Take a look at all related financial hacks on blockchain from Rekt.News, its almost all EVM based smart contracts. This forces the community to develop even more security standards and oracles such as Chainlink bring even more robustness to the blockchain.
The critical learning point: EVM, and the Solidity language has become a standard.
But why Solidity as a standard, why not Ethereum as a standard?
Just think about Javascript.
ECMAScript is the standards definition, very much like bytecode definitions for EVM. Javascript is simply the most adopted browser implementation of ECMAScript — Very much like Solidity is.
Ethereum is absolutely awesome but there are many challenges to rely on only a single blockchain:
- Gas fees on Ethereum are likely to be remain expensive. In the near term, not all use cases can fit in one blockchain
Being first at smart contracts and second most widely adopted blockchain on the planet, every possible use case would be attempted to deploy on the protocol first. However not every use case can afford the same gas fees based on an auction model.
The implication is that only the highest value use cases (the ones in green on the diagram) where security needs are high and the complexity of the transactions are low would likely persist on Ethereum mainnet.
But what about the rest of the use cases in orange and red? In the real world where implementation has tradeoffs, a single blockchain offers limited implementation tradeoffs as every transaction in the Ethereum protocol offers the same level of security/protection and provenance by miners/stakers.
Think about this: A billion-dollar transfer can be committed with the same cost and security as a ten-dollar transfer on Ethereum protocol. Does this make sense to you? Multi-chains sound more plausible.
2. Ethereum Maximalism would forgo the benefits that other blockchains would bring to the larger ecosystem
What about the privacy and anonymity of Monero’s & Zcash’s money transfers? What about Bitcoin’s Lightning Network? What about Cardarno’s ecosystem focus on the unbanked?
3. Multiple blockchains helps reduce hacking risk overall through diversification
Let’s not kid ourselves that a single technical vulnerability can take down a network. Remember the DAO attack that took 15% of all Ether with it?
For any developer in the blockchain technology, it is more sensible to replicate your smart contract implementation across multiple blockchains to diversify this risk away. For a user who is storing wealth and value in blockchain technology, just like traditional portfolio management, it is natural to diversify your investments across multiple chains.
The implication is that we need an interoperable standard to communicate between blockchains. Here comes Polkadot, the blockchain of interoperable blockchains
Polkadot enables cross-blockchain transfers of any type of data or asset, not just tokens. Connecting to Polkadot gives you the ability to interoperate with a wide variety of blockchains in the Polkadot network.
It offers multiple ways to connect blockchains into the Polkadot ecosystem:
Polkadot’s relay chain is built with Substrate, a blockchain-building framework that is the distillation of Parity Technologies’ learnings building Ethereum, Bitcoin, and enterprise blockchains. The Polkadot runtime environment is being coded in Rust, C++, and Golang, making Polkadot accessible to a wide range of developers.
In fact, Polkadot was founded by Dr Gavin Wood, the same person who wrote the Ethereum Yellow Paper. To make Polkadot even more robust and hacking resilent, the underlying organisation, the Web3 Foundation launched an additional “less secure” protocol for the ecosystem: Kusama.
Comparing them, Kusama and Polkadot are independent, standalone networks built on very similar codebases, but Kusama has faster governance parameters and lower barriers to entry. While Kusama is wild and fast, Polkadot is more conservative, prioritizing stability and dependability, with slower, more methodical governance and upgrade processes. Kusama is great for bold experimentation and early-stage deployment. Polkadot is designed for stable execution of risk-averse, high-value applications.
Thats awesome, but hang on… but where is EVM and Solidity in the mix?
That’s when Moonbeam comes in…
Moonbeam is a Fully Ethereum-Compatible environment on Polkadot. But it’s much more than just an EVM implementation: it’s a highly specialized Layer 1.5 chain that mirrors Ethereum’s Web3 RPC, accounts, keys, subscriptions, logs, and more. The Moonbeam platform extends the base Ethereum feature set with additional features such as on-chain governance, staking, and cross-chain integrations. Moonbeam uses Glimmer utility tokens to compute on the blockchain.
Similarly, an Ethereum-Compatible cousin network is being deployed on Kusama known as Moonriver:
A community is growing on Moonbeam Foundation as well.
Famous DEFI protocols like Balancer and SushiSwap have already started to test on Moonbeam’s Alpha testnet. Full list of projects looking to start on MoonBeam can be found here:
Tokenomics is fairly distributed on Moonbeam’s GLMR and MOVR tokens.
What this means for the blockchain industry as a whole? We are very likely to see a flurry of innovation from every angle. Whether you love it or hate it, EVM and Solidity is here to stay.
