EVM: Behind, Yet Irreplaceable?

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), as the pioneer of smart contracts, has driven the explosive growth of blockchain applications. However, from a technical perspective, the EVM has long seemed outdated.

First, the execution efficiency of the EVM is low. It uses interpreted execution, processing each instruction one by one, which is much slower than new generation parallel virtual machines like Solana's Sealevel or Aptos's Move VM. Second, the EVM has a single-threaded architecture and cannot process transactions in parallel, severely limiting throughput. In contrast, new blockchain technologies are actively introducing concurrent execution mechanisms, significantly enhancing processing capabilities. Additionally, the EVM's data structure is simple but inefficient, with high costs for accessing state, leading to performance bottlenecks for smart contracts during complex interactions. Not to mention, the EVM inherently lacks resource management and complex permission control features, requiring developers to fill in these gaps with contract logic, which is both cumbersome and error-prone.

However, despite its technological lag, the EVM still holds an unshakable dominant position in the crypto world. The largest number of blockchain developers globally are proficient in Solidity, with the richest ecosystem of DeFi and NFT projects, a complete toolchain (such as Metamask, Hardhat, Foundry, etc.), and almost all new chains are striving for EVM compatibility, such as BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, etc.

This makes the EVM the "TCP/IP" of the blockchain field: the technology may not be optimal, but the entire infrastructure has been deeply built around it, making migration costly and difficult.

In summary, the EVM has become outdated in technical evolution, but due to its vast developer network, mature ecosystem, and compatibility advantages, it still firmly controls the center of blockchain applications. In the future, perhaps the real revolution is not to abandon the EVM, but to find a new paradigm that balances ecology and performance.