<\/p>\n
The Ethereum scaling story tends to center around layer-2 rollups, but what about the EVM itself? Does the virtual machine suffer from limitations that are inherent to the execution layer of the system, or can developers overcome them?<\/p>\n
While rollups take the computation load off the Ethereum mainchain, Blockworks co-founder Michael Ippolito wondered how the computation that occurs directly on Ethereum could be more \u201cperformant.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo rollups solve all of our scalability challenges, or is there still work to be done on the execution layer?\u201d he asked during the Permissionless II<\/a> conference in Austin, Texas.<\/p>\n Monad Labs developer relations engineer Kevin Galler replied: \u201cA lot of the current limitations of the EVM<\/a> we know today are actually more of a side effect of how the backend computer of this EVM has been constructed up until now,\u201d but are not inherent to the interface or the bytecode.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can actually design parallelism and stuff into this,\u201d he said, acknowledging that \u201cthere\u2019s stuff you have to work around to maintain backwards compatibility.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s like, 20 years of high performance computing research on how to do these things,\u201d he said, \u201cso, it\u2019s a very solvable problem.\u201d<\/p>\n Offchain Labs senior software engineer Raul Jordan admitted that the current implementation of the EVM is \u201cfairly slow for many reasons,\u201d adding \u201cthere are many things we can do to power that up.\u201d<\/p>\n Jordan noted that developers are already accustomed to being able to build DeFi<\/a> primitives and other \u201creally cool applications\u201d with the EVM as it stands today, but wondered \u201chow can we give them superpowers to build something greater than they have before?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow can we empower them?\u201d he asked. \u201cShould we make the EVM faster, or can we introduce new constructs that allow them to do things that weren\u2019t possible before?\u201d<\/p>\n Somani expressed concerns with the possibility of an excess of layer-2 protocols. \u201cThe issue with the single threaded EVM\u2026is that it results in a lot of rollups.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s people suggesting there should be millions of rollups<\/a> or something,\u201d Somani continued. \u201cThat\u2019s going to lead to a lot of issues with liquidity fragmentation and end-to-user experience.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSufficiently advanced virtual machines\u201d have local fee markets, Somani said, \u201cso that if there\u2019s a lot of activity on one app, it doesn\u2019t congest all those.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo bringing that [virtual machine] to Ethereum<\/a> can lead to this highly parallelized [layer-2<\/a>] that doesn\u2019t really need all these other robots to exist,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t cheat physics,\u201d Galler interjected. \u201cBandwidth is fundamentally what limits how fast a lot of these blockchains can run.\u201d<\/p>\n Reflecting on scaling challenges, Jordan referred to the example of Arbitrum Stylus, noting that the product allows developers to write code in common programming languages like Rust and C++, compiling to a special instruction format called WebAssembly. \u201cYou can actually execute this side by side with EVM smart contracts<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo we ended up realizing that the EVM is not the ceiling,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s actually the floor.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou can do a lot more than you thought was possible while still maintaining the same guarantees.\u201d<\/p>\n Scalability at the execution layer \u201chas a long way to go,\u201d Jordan added, \u201cand we\u2019re trying to get there.\u201d<\/p>\n Get the day\u2019s top crypto news and insights delivered to your email every evening.\u00a0Subscribe to Blockworks\u2019 free newsletter<\/a>\u00a0now.<\/strong><\/p>\n Want alpha sent directly to your inbox? Get degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance, can\u2019t-miss tweets and more from\u00a0Blockworks Research\u2019s Daily Debrief<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n Can\u2019t wait? Get our news the fastest way possible.\u00a0Join us on Telegram<\/a>\u00a0and follow us on\u00a0Google News<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Ethereum scaling story tends to center around layer-2 rollups, but what about the EVM itself? Does the virtual machine suffer from limitations that are inherent to the execution layer of the system, or can developers overcome them? While rollups take the computation load off the Ethereum mainchain, Blockworks co-founder Michael Ippolito wondered how the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155776,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[230,225,221,227,226,228,229,60,223,224,222],"class_list":["post-155775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-brave","tag-coinbase","tag-crypto","tag-decentralised","tag-decentralized","tag-decentralized-exchange","tag-erc-20","tag-featured","tag-meme-coin","tag-robinhood","tag-solana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155775"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155778,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155775\/revisions\/155778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Can\u2019t cheat physics<\/h2>\n
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