The Rise of Parallel EVM: A New Era of Blockchain Performance

Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, Breaking Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks

The blockchain network has created a new, decentralized trust foundation for individuals and businesses to conduct transactions. With the booming development of the industry, higher demands have been placed on product experience, especially in terms of performance. Following the DeFi Summer of 2020 and the continuous outbreak of inscriptions in the Bitcoin ecosystem at the end of 2023, the industry is in urgent need of new performance enhancement solutions to meet the requirements of "high performance and low fees." Parallel Blockchains were born in this context.

The parallel EVM narrative marks the formation of a competitive landscape of two strong contenders in the field of parallel Blockchains. Ethereum processes transactions in a serial manner, executing them one after another in order, resulting in low resource utilization. Transitioning from serial processing to parallel processing would bring significant performance improvements. Competitors of Ethereum, such as Solana, Aptos, and Sui, all come with parallel processing capabilities and have developed strong ecosystems, forming a non-EVM parallel camp. In the face of challenges, the Ethereum ecosystem has also stepped up to empower the EVM, forming a parallel EVM camp.

A Comprehensive Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through the Blockchain Performance Bottleneck?

Currently, the overall circulating market value of L1 and L2 is $752.123 billion, and the circulating market value of parallel blockchains is $52.539 billion, accounting for only about 7%. Among them, the circulating market value of parallel EVM narrative-related projects is $2.339 billion, accounting for only 4% of the circulating market value of parallel blockchains. It can be seen that there is still significant market growth potential for parallel EVM narratives, and the parallel blockchain sector to which parallel EVM narratives belong also has considerable market growth potential, therefore the market prospects are broad.

Ten Thousand Characters Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

The parallel EVM narrative project is mainly divided into monolithic Blockchains and modular Blockchains, with monolithic Blockchains further divided into L1 and L2. L1 is a new public chain with built-in parallel execution capabilities, serving as a high-performance infrastructure. Projects represented by Sei v2, Monad, and Canto design their own parallel EVM, compatible with the Ethereum ecosystem and providing high throughput transaction processing capabilities. L2 integrates the capabilities of other L1 chains to provide scalability for cross-ecosystem cooperation, making it a prominent area for rollups. Neon is an EVM simulator on the Solana network, while Eclipse utilizes Solana to execute transactions but settles on EVM. Lumio is similar to Eclipse, except it replaces the execution layer with Aptos. Fuel proposes its own modular Blockchain approach, focusing on executing transactions while outsourcing the rest to one or more independent layers of Blockchains, thus achieving more flexible combinations.

Ten Thousand Words Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

The parallel EVM is mainly an optimization of the performance of the execution layer. This can be divided into two types: a Layer 1 network solution (L1) and a Layer 2 network solution (L2). The Layer 1 solution introduces a transaction parallel execution mechanism, allowing transactions to be executed as parallel as possible within the virtual machine. The Layer 2 solution essentially utilizes the already parallelized Layer 1 virtual machine to achieve a certain level of "off-chain execution + on-chain settlement."

In the context of Blockchain, a virtual machine refers to the virtualization of a distributed state machine, used to execute contracts in a distributed manner and run dApps. EVM is a process virtual machine designed for the Solidity language, where smart contracts are first compiled into opcode bytecode and then interpreted and executed by the EVM.

Ten Thousand Words Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

Parallel execution refers to leveraging the advantages of multi-core processors to execute multiple transactions simultaneously at the same time, while ensuring that the final state is consistent with the result of serial execution. The parallel execution mechanism is divided into three main categories: message passing, shared memory, and strict state access list. Shared memory is further divided into memory lock model and optimistic parallelization.

In the message passing model, each executor responsible for processing transactions is an actor, and they all have access to their own private data. If they want to access someone else's private data, it can only be achieved by sending messages. The advantage of this model is that each actor can only access its own private data, thus avoiding race condition issues. However, the downside is that each actor can only execute serially, which does not leverage parallel advantages in certain scenarios, and there is no global information regarding the current system state.

Ten Thousand Words Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

The memory lock model allows tasks executing in parallel to perform a locking operation when accessing shared resources. After locking, access to the shared resource is granted, during which other tasks must wait until it is modified and unlocked before they can lock and access it again. This mechanism seems simple, but it is quite complex to implement and tests the developer's ability to manage multithreaded programming. Issues such as deadlocks, livelocks, and starvation can easily occur.

Ten Thousand Words Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

The core idea of optimistic parallelization is to first assume that all tasks are independent of each other. Tasks are executed in parallel first, and then each task is validated. If the validation fails, that task is re-executed until all tasks are completed. This model uses a multi-version memory data structure to record each written value and its version information. The execution of each parallel task is divided into two stages: execution and validation. The execution speed is extremely fast, but the complex transaction execution and validation are handled by the core team implementing the underlying mechanisms.

Ten Thousand Words Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

Strict state access lists are implemented based on the UTXO model for parallel execution. It pre-calculates the account addresses that each transaction will access, forming an access list. Multiple sets of transactions are formed based on the access list, where there is no overlap on the access list between each transaction set ( and there are no dependencies ), thus multiple transaction sets can be executed in parallel.

Ten Thousand Words Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

Regardless of the parallel execution mechanism employed, it has increased the complexity of the technology. Code is written by humans, and being written by humans makes it prone to errors. The technical complexity brought about by parallel computing provides a breeding ground for security risks. Practitioners need to pay high attention to the potential security issues that may exist.

Sei is a general-purpose public blockchain based on open-source technology, currently with a circulating market value of nearly $2.2 billion. Sei v2 claims to be the first parallel EVM Blockchain, and this version upgrade will bring new features such as backward compatibility for EVM smart contracts, reuse of common tools/apps like Metamask, optimistic parallelization, optimization of the storage layer with SeiDB, and support for seamless interoperability between Ethereum and other chains.

Ten Thousand Words Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

Monad is regarded as a potential disruptor in the L1 track. The project has successfully achieved the milestone of launching its internal testnet and is working towards the next step of opening the public testnet. Monad introduces two mechanisms for the Ethereum Virtual Machine: one is superscalar pipeline technology, and the other is an improved optimistic concurrency mechanism. Currently, its performance reaches 10,000 TPS and can produce blocks in 1 second.

Ten Thousand Characters Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottleneck?

Canto is a highly decentralized L1 project built on the Cosmos SDK. Canto's primary vision is to become an accessible, transparent, decentralized, and free DeFi value platform. On March 18, 2024, Canto announced its new round of technical iteration plans, which will include a parallel EVM upgrade: introducing optimistic parallelization through the implementation of Cyclone EVM.

Wanzi Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

Fuel is a customized modular "Ethereum rollup operating system". Fuel uses UTXO as its data model, and there is an advantage to adopting this data model: its transaction outputs have only two states, either spent, permanently recorded in the block's transaction history; or unspent, available for future transactions. This further minimizes the state data storage on each node on the chain. Based on this, Fuel checks the account information accessed by each transaction, identifies dependencies before executing the transaction, and schedules transactions with no dependencies to be executed in parallel, improving the throughput of transaction processing.

Ten Thousand Words Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

L2 solutions share a commonality: they combine the capabilities of two virtual machines to enhance the execution speed of transactions. Specifically, this means using parallel L1 to execute transactions, but being compatible with other chains ( dual virtual machine support ). The difference lies in the varying compatibility mechanisms adopted by different projects. Neon, Eclipse, and Lumio are quite representative.

Neon is an EVM simulator on the Solana network, operating in the form of smart contracts. Developers can write dApp applications in languages such as Solidity and Vyper, and can use Ethereum toolchains like MetaMask, Hardhat, Remix, and compatible Ethereum RPC APIs, accounts, signatures, and token standards. At the same time, enjoy the low fees, high transaction execution speed, and parallel execution capabilities brought by Solana.

Ten Thousand Words Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through the Blockchain Performance Bottleneck?

Eclipse adopts another implementation approach: executing transactions through SVM and settling transactions through EVM. Eclipse adopts a modular Blockchain architecture, meaning it is only responsible for the execution of transactions, while outsourcing other responsibilities to form a unified solution through modular combinations. Eclipse utilizes SVM to ensure execution speed and guarantees security through Ethereum's validation and settlement.

Ten Thousand Character Interpretation of Parallel EVM: Beyond Serial, How to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks?

Lumio adopts a design approach that is independent of the execution layer and settlement layer, supporting multiple virtual machines and compatible with various L1/L2 networks. It executes transactions through Move VM and settles transactions through EVM, thus connecting the Ethereum ecosystem and the Aptos ecosystem. However, Lumio's ambition does not stop there; its vision is to provide cross-virtual machine calls, achieving interconnection of liquidity across multiple Blockchains with the fastest speed and lowest fees.

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WalletManagervip
· 08-09 00:40
Chip parallelism is key
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FadCatchervip
· 08-06 15:54
Performance is the key to victory.
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ThatsNotARugPullvip
· 08-06 15:47
Focus on the direction of parallelization
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GasWranglervip
· 08-06 15:45
The track is too competitive.
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TokenAlchemistvip
· 08-06 15:39
Performance breakthroughs are timely.
View OriginalReply0
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