What is EVM? What blockchains are compatible with EVM?
What is EVM?
The Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM for short, is a virtual machine that runs on the Ethereum network. It is Turing complete, allowing anyone to run arbitrary EVM bytecode from anywhere. The EVM is used by all Ethereum nodes. It serves as a home for Ethereum-based smart contracts.
Understanding Ethereum’s virtual machine (EVM) necessitates a review of BitTorrent software’s ancestor. According to Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, BitTorrent was the first Decentralized Application (DApp): a community of independent users who generate and exchange data for one another through an open internet network.
Despite persistent, international, billion-dollar efforts to eradicate it, programmer Bram Cohen built BitTorrent as a file sharing protocol in 2001, and it is still very much alive today. The latest movies and software may still be downloaded in minutes to your laptop via the BitTorrent protocol. To fully stop BitTorrent, every computer in every home in every country on the earth would have to be turned off. The EVM is no exception. This is why the Ethereum Network, which is decentralized, is dubbed “The Unstoppable World Computer.”
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the program that determines how to compute a new valid state from block to block. The EVM is a robust, sandboxed virtual stack that executes contract bytecode and is incorporated within each entire Ethereum node. Contracts are usually authored in high-level languages like Solidity and then compiled into EVM bytecode.
This means that the machine code is totally separated from the host computer’s network, disk, and other operations. Every node in the Ethereum network runs an EVM instance, allowing them to agree on the same set of instructions to be executed.
The physical manifestation of the EVM cannot be compared to that of a cloud or an ocean wave, but it does exist as a single entity maintained by thousands of connected computers running an Ethereum client.
The Ethereum protocol is the environment in which all Ethereum accounts and smart contracts live, and it exists solely to ensure the continuous, uninterrupted, and immutable operation of this special state machine. Ethereum has one and only one ‘canonical’ state at any given block in the chain, and the EVM is what defines the rules for computing a new valid state from block to block.
Here is a list of Ethereum alternatives or EVM compatible blockchains:
- Ethereum
- Avalanche C-Chain
- BNB Chain
- Polygon
- Fantom
- Moonriver
- Elastos Smart Chain
- Metis
- OKExCHAIN
- KCCPad
- Theta
- HPB
- GoChain
- TomoChain
- IoTex
- RSK
- Moonbeam
- CoinEx Smart Chain
- Aurora
- Fuse
- Telos EVM
- Gnosis Chain
- Shiden Network
- Energy Web Chain
- Fusion
- Harmony
- Cronos
- Syscoin
- Smart Bitcoin Cash
- Celo
- Boba Network
- Optimism
- ZYX NETWORK
- Polis Chain
- Thunder Core
- Klatyn
- Meter
- Arbitrum One
- Callisto Network
- Wanchain
- Songbird
- Huobi ECO
- Emerald Paratime
- Ubiq
- Velas
