EOS established the EVM+ working group to achieve EVM compatibility

Source: EOS Network Foundation

Overview

EOS is harnessing the power of the community to collaboratively develop key projects necessary for the ecosystem, further driving the revival of the EOS ecosystem. We have talented developers, community leaders capable of making significant contributions, and a highly responsible and action-oriented EOS Network Foundation.

EOS is paving its own way forward and ushering in a new era of collaboration.

Currently, six core working groups funded by the EOS Network Foundation are operating at high speed, with each group playing an important role in its respective field. The blueprints for the API+, Core+, Wallet+, and Audit+ working groups are nearing completion, with each blueprint being an important research outcome that will detail development goals and feasible strategies for success in their respective fields.

Today, we will introduce the EVM+ core working group. Before the formal introduction, let's take a look at the overview of the six core working groups.

Introduction to the Six Core Working Groups

Currently, the EOS Network Foundation has sponsored the establishment of six core working groups, which are:

· API+: Mainly responsible for providing data interfaces to help applications outside the EOS ecosystem better integrate with the EOS network.

· Core+: Mainly responsible for maintaining the EOS system to make it more suitable for running various categories of applications.

· Wallet+: Mainly responsible for integrating EOS into external applications in collaboration with software.

· Audit+: Mainly responsible for providing security analysis tools and an overall framework for contract auditing for EOS applications.

· EVM+: Mainly responsible for achieving compatibility with EVM and exploring economic incentives for the feasibility of EOS.

· Recovery+: Mainly responsible for establishing a crisis management framework to help EOS projects respond to crises and recover lost assets in a more reasonable and effective manner after encountering hacker attacks through measures such as emergency contacts, response mechanisms, DAO insurance, and white hat rewards.

The core working groups will collaborate with the most experienced individuals and organizations in the EOS ecosystem to play an important role in implementing the EOS roadmap. This will be an excellent opportunity to assess the current state of the EOS ecosystem, identify potential issues, and formulate a roadmap for future development.

Each working group has received funding of $200,000 to $250,000 from the EOS Network Foundation, and an additional $100,000 has been allocated to establish a supervisory group specifically to oversee the overall progress of the working groups.

However, due to community demand and ecological needs, the EVM+ working group's workflow is slightly different from that of the other working groups. Under the leadership of EOS Argentina, the EVM+ working group will adopt a more agile approach to development.

The EVM+ working group will not write blueprints but will directly engage in development and product delivery, thereby achieving EVM compatibility on the EOS smart contract layer more quickly. Additionally, the initial budget for the EVM+ working group is set at $200,000.

Introduction to the EVM+ Working Group

One of the most important issues currently facing EOS is blockchain interoperability.

A common problem in the blockchain field is the inward focus on development, neglecting outward compatibility and learning from others, which is particularly evident in EOS. Developers often fall into a mindset that EOS has the best technology, so EOS is the best place, even when others in the public chain ecosystem have not yet recognized EOS's potential.

Such thinking can isolate EOS from the broader blockchain world, making it easy to miss many opportunities. Many developers have left EOS for Ethereum, citing that while Ethereum has its flaws, it offers better compatibility.

This is also a key reason for establishing the EVM+ working group and accelerating work in this area. Deploying the Ethereum Virtual Machine on EOS is a very important task, and we need to promote EOS's integration into the broader blockchain ecosystem, continuously bringing in and going out, embracing compatibility and rapid development.

From both technical and business perspectives, achieving EVM compatibility can play a crucial role in unlocking EOS's potential. We need more Ethereum developers and users to join the EOS ecosystem, and helping EOS achieve EVM compatibility is the best way to attract them.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants to Attract Talent

The leadership team of the EVM+ working group consists of the EOS genesis block producer EOS Argentina, which is also behind the development of Evodex and EOS Metamask wallets.

Assisting the EVM+ working group is renowned EOS ecosystem developer Syed Jafri, who won the EVM Challenge organized by Block.one in 2020 with EOSIO.EVM. EOSIO.EVM enables Solidity developers to quickly launch and run applications on EOSIO at speeds up to 100 times faster and at costs less than 1000 times lower. It can be said that Syed Jafri has extensive experience in helping EOS achieve EVM compatibility.

EVM is an innovation that EOS urgently needs. One of the main issues faced by the EOS public chain in recent years is a lack of funding. Let's compare it with the Ethereum ecosystem:

· Ethereum is slower, less efficient, and has very high gas costs, but it has higher network effects and token liquidity between Ethereum and other EVM-based public chains. On the other hand, some developers on Ethereum can earn high returns by creating modular, reusable, secure open-source smart contracts based on Solidity, while others can access rich development tools and tutorials through organizations like OpenZeppelin. An undeniable fact is that the developer tools, code libraries, and open-source code available for dApp developers in the EVM ecosystem have been rapidly growing.

· In contrast, in the EOS ecosystem, developers can only use less mature tools to build many code libraries from scratch. An inappropriate analogy would be: developers in the Ethereum ecosystem building cars like stacking blocks, simply piecing together ready-made wheels, steering wheels, engines, etc., while developers in the EOS ecosystem wanting to build cars need to start from making wheels.

Other working groups sponsored by the EOS Network Foundation are focusing on improving the experience for EOS developers and providing more available native tools, but it will take some time to fully realize this.

Therefore, both we and the community believe that we can leverage the existing talent and resources of EVM and introduce them into EOS through EVM compatibility to unlock the potential of the EOS ecosystem.

The development of EOS has entered an extremely important year, and EOS still faces two significant challenges:

· On one hand, EOS must demonstrate its immense potential and value to potential developers;

· On the other hand, EOS must eliminate barriers to entry for developers, lowering the threshold as much as possible to attract more developers to join.

Even if project parties or developers believe EOS is better, if the process of entering the EOS ecosystem is long and cumbersome, project parties and developers will not join. Therefore, helping developers from other public chains deploy, migrate, or clone projects into the EOS ecosystem in a barrier-free, low-threshold manner is a more effective approach.

EVM+ Working Group: Bridging EVM and EOSIO

The overall goal of EVM+ is to make EOS a compatible EVM platform from the perspective of developers and users. To this end, here are the key issues the working group is addressing:

· Compatibility at the smart contract level and implementation in native nodes: EOS Argentina is working to develop smart contract-based solutions that allow EVM to run normally in the EOS VM WASM runtime. This will enable the EOS network to upgrade EVM operations without protocol upgrades (no forks).

· ETH precompiled contracts: This benefits both EVM on EOS and smart contract developers. Like other chains, EOS has a limited transaction execution time (150 milliseconds for the protocol, 30 milliseconds for BP). Although EOS VM is powerful and fast, there are still some types of operations that lack the optimizations they could achieve in native code when executed in WebAssembly. To speed things up, the EVM+ working group is seeking to implement ETH precompiles as intrinsic functions (native code) in EOS.

· Fully compatible RPC: Plans in this area are still under development, but the EVM+ team's goal is to support at least most RPCs to allow the use of common tools/development environments on ETH. This will be one of the most important tasks of the plan.

· Deterministic gas consumption/billing: The EOS chain uses three resources: CPU (subjective measurement/variable price), NET (objective measurement/variable price), and RAM (objective measurement/variable price) for billing. The challenge in this area is to provide users with deterministic gas consumption and competitive gas prices while preventing abuse of the Web3 API.

· Support for Metamask: This means that the EOS ecosystem will support the Metamask wallet to facilitate interaction between EOS native contracts and EVM contracts written in Solidity.

The EVM+ working group will rapidly advance work in the aforementioned directions to create the best solutions for achieving EVM compatibility for EOS, with plans to produce viable solutions before the summer of 2022.

The current six working groups are building a framework to make it easier for developers and users to participate in EOS, promoting the growth of the EOS network and making the EOS ecosystem more attractive. The future of EOS has never been brighter. We invite you to join us in creating the greatest comeback story in the blockchain world.