Since its emergence, blockchain has continued to evolve. Due to its innovative prowess, blockchain’s use cases have spread across various sectors and industries. This simply means outside crypto, several sectors and industries now depend on the capacity of blockchain to facilitate their routine endeavors.
The traditional banking sector, for instance, leverages blockchain to ensure that its services are streamlined, secure, consistent, and faster. That’s not all. Some notable organizations also rely on this technology to adequately manage their distributed databases, digital transactions, and many more. With this milestone, blockchain has started witnessing massive growth in popularity and adoption.
The growing adoption of blockchain is fueled by its ability to guarantee optimal security. Don’t forget that it is primarily built on the foundations of cryptography, consensus, and decentralization. With these, blockchain boasts efficient security features. Nevertheless, despite its security efficiency, one factor that has continued to threaten the optimal performance of a blockchain is scalability.
Scalability in Blockchain
The term “scalability” is used to describe the ability of a blockchain network to process a given number of transactions within some specified periods. In simpler terms, it means the transaction speed of a given network. Therefore, a blockchain network can be said to be highly scalable if it possesses the capacity to process a huge array of transactions very fast.
Without a doubt, many blockchain networks still struggle to achieve that. Hence, it is not surprising that different solutions are coming to light to help scale blockchains with low scalability capacity. The emergence of layer-2 blockchains, for instance, is one of those solutions that have been developed to tackle scalability issues. Specifically, layer-2 chains run as scaling mechanisms on layer-1 networks, thereby enhancing their speed, particularly during congestion.
Examples of popular layer-2 chains include Nordek, Bitcoin Lightning, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and many more. Arbitrum, for instance, focuses on addressing scalability issues on Ethereum. Worth noting that all these layer-2 networks cannot work on their own without the support of their underlying blockchains.
What are EVM compatible blockchains?
Ethereum Virtual Machine works like a computer running on a blockchain. The manner in which the EVM runs is similar to how a typical virtual machine operates; a computer running on another computer.
Therefore, EVM as a computer relies on the Ethereum network to store unchangeable data and execute codes in smart contracts. These smart contracts can come in various dimensions based on their functions. Examples of these smart contracts are cryptocurrencies, NFTs, gaming, and governance dApps.
As a result of this infrastructure, it is easy for developers to swiftly create decentralized applications on EVM. Consequently, for a blockchain to be EVM-compatible implies that every decentralized application designed using the innovation will work perfectly on the compatible network. For example, if blockchains A, B, C, and D are all EVM compatible, decentralized applications created on any of these networks will work perfectly on others.
Furthermore, EVM-compatible blockchains remain interconnected allowing their wallets, tokens, and dApps to work perfectly on networks within this circle. Gradually, the relevance of smart contracts and decentralized applications has projected the EVM chain as the regular standard for Web3 networks.
It is worth mentioning that Solidity is the most preferred programming language for designing a smart contract on the EVM. In 2014, Gavin Wood first proposed this programming language before a team led by Christian Reitwiessner perfected the innovation. Nonetheless, EVM supports other programming languages but developers must be careful while using them.
Meanwhile, you can define an EVM blockchain as a decentralized network supported by a host of computers and nodes. Due to its decentralized nature, EVM blockchains are transparent and data recorded on them are unchangeable. Additionally, EVM runs in a trustless atmosphere for network participants, providing a high level of security.
EVM-compatible Blockchain – Conclusion
Despite offering a host of opportunities, compatibility with the EVM has its downsides too. Running a smart contract on the EVM comes with a high cost as gas fees. This is a result of the voluminous amount of smart contracts running on the EVM. Nonetheless, the dynamic posture of the innovation has birthed the introduction of different solutions. These solutions to an extent have helped in beating down the heavy billing on gas fees.