In the next 2-5 years, the focus of VM competition will be to attract application developers.
Article by Austin King, Co-founder of Omni Network
Translated by Luffy, Foresight News
What will the future hold for the billions of dollars in encrypted virtual machines (VMs)? So far, EVM has been in a dominant position, but is it outdated? Will developers continue to move forward? This article will share three personal perspectives on the future of encrypted VMs.
Perspective 1: New general-purpose EVM L2s will all fail
There is simply no reason to introduce new general-purpose EVM L2s. It will be extremely difficult to attract new developers because you will have to compete with liquidity giants like Arbitrum. Blast has a genius go-to-market strategy (GTM) because it disrupts the standard strategy used by other Rollups, which is:
Recruit developers to build applications
Attract users through applications
Blast’s approach is:
Bootstrap liquidity
Attract developers through liquidity
Blast is an OP Stack Rollup. But without an application ecosystem and liquidity, it will be worthless because you can simply launch a new OP Stack Rollup with Conduit or Caldera for a few thousand dollars a month. The venture capital frenzy has ended, and it has become more difficult to build an entire ecosystem from scratch. Therefore, the valuation of general-purpose EVM L2s is declining.
Perspective 2: Successful new applications will be built on high-performance virtual machines
Better performance attracts more developers, which means more innovation, and future applications are more likely to be built on your platform.
Currently, many interesting experiments are being conducted at the VM layer. Sei Network and Monad’s parallel EVM believe that EVM is like JavaScript and will continue to exist. What we need to do is optimize it fundamentally to improve cost and throughput.
Celestia does not optimize the virtual machine itself, but it gives developers the ability to build sovereign Rollups that use Celestia as data availability (DA), greatly reducing costs and improving throughput. When you realize that transaction costs can be as low as a fraction of a cent, the design space for cryptocurrencies completely opens up. If you optimize the infrastructure on which Rollup itself depends and save most of the costs, optimizing the virtual machine is not necessary. Honestly, they are in a very favorable position because they can allow the most successful virtual machine to use Celestia.
In addition, one of the coolest things in the Ethereum ecosystem is that various teams are introducing brand-new, highly optimized virtual machines into Ethereum, which will run as L2. As far as I know, Eclipse is the first team to try this idea. They adopt the proven SVM and turn it into Ethereum’s L2. SVM has native transaction parallelism, which is currently unreachable for EVM.
Movement Labs introduces the Move VM into the Ethereum ecosystem, which not only brings significant performance improvements but also is the only cryptocurrency VM designed by programming language experts. This makes it easier to learn, more secure, and potentially more scalable in the long run.
Then we have Rollups, which allow code from multiple VMs to run in one environment. Fluent is such a Rollup that “mixes” the execution of WASM VM, EVM, and SVM. This is a very new idea, and both technically and from a GTM perspective, it is very cool. When you can combine multiple performance-optimized Rollups into one execution environment and give them all liquidity, why would you isolate yourself in a separate stack?
Perspective 3: The VM layer will be chaotic in the next 2-5 years
Currently, the most likely “winner” is EVM. SVM has received a lot of attention in the past few years, but EVM is still the market leader. With the development of networks, we have accidentally discovered that JavaScript has become the standard language used by browsers around the world. JavaScript is rubbish, everyone knows that. It was developed in two weeks. EVM has also undergone extensive modifications and was developed by the early Ethereum team with limited experience.
However, with L2, we have separated settlement and execution. This means we have a unique opportunity to abandon EVM on L1 and try new VMs that are objectively better designed on L2. In the next 2-5 years, we will see intense competition among developers, users, and liquidity in these new VM stacks. Even the largest EVM L2s tend to lean towards this reality, as evidenced by Arbitrum’s launch of Stylus.
What is most exciting is that all these well-funded teams have to fight for developers. Over the past three years, venture capital companies have been too obsessed with infrastructure and have invested heavily in this area, resulting in insufficient investment in applications that can promote further adoption in the cryptocurrency industry.
Now all infrastructure project teams know that the first thing they need to do to consolidate their position and achieve long-term success is to build the next successful application on their platform. Therefore, almost all incentive measures are aimed at driving application-level innovation.
I believe that in 5 years or more from now, there will be a VM with a adoption rate of over 95% among developers. But before that, we will see many well-funded companies competing to prove the superiority of their stacks, all in order to attract developers at the application layer.
Tags:
Javascript
Omni Network
Rollup
Ethereum
Source link:
https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/63820
Note: The opinions expressed in this article do not constitute investment advice.