Parallel EVM New Star Lumio: The White Knight of Ethereum Scalability New Primitives

Author: NingNing

After the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum equivalence no longer has inherent correctness.

The core of Ethereum equivalence is EVM compatibility. EVM compatibility is important not only because of the simplicity, reliability, and completeness of development tools associated with EVM, but also due to the significant lead of the EVM developer community and the scale of accumulated assets. EVM compatibility allows any chain/Rollup to quickly acquire developers, users, capital, and other resources from the Ethereum ecosystem, serving as a shortcut to reach the PMF point.

However, EVM is far from perfect. Its state data account mechanism and serial state data processing give a sense of comparison between a 19th-century ironclad and a 21st-century destroyer when compared to the VM characteristics of high-performance public chains.

After the Cancun upgrade, although the Gas fees of mainstream Rollup L2 have decreased by two orders of magnitude, the anticipated explosion of the Ethereum L2 ecosystem has not materialized. Instead, we have witnessed strong growth in the ecosystems of high-performance public chains like Solana and Sui. This has prompted some sharp minds in the crypto industry to reflect on whether pursuing complete Ethereum equivalence as the ultimate goal for general Rollup L2 expansion solutions is the wrong direction.

Currently, parallel expansion solutions have three main drawbacks: the consistency of EVM compatibility and underlying mechanisms leads to a high degree of homogeneity among Dapps in the Ethereum mainnet and the Ethereum general L2 ecosystem; the L1-L2-L3 central radiating network structure significantly deprives Dapp developers of sovereignty; and the linear scalability enhancement of numerous L2 implementations gives a clumsy feeling akin to mechanically stacking Legos.

Therefore, there needs to be both parallel expansion solutions and vertical expansion solutions. Perhaps it is time to try introducing the transaction parallel processing capabilities of high-performance public chain VMs into the Ethereum ecosystem to create some chaos and uncertainty. Recently, parallel EVM projects Monad, Movement, and Lumio (Pontem) have all announced new rounds of financing led and participated in by top crypto VCs.

Monad and Movement need no further introduction as they are very well-known. We will focus on the relatively low-profile Lumio.

Lumio is a parallel EVM project developed by the Pontem team, positioned as the altVM layer of Ethereum. It is a VM abstraction protocol that supports multiple VMs, including Move, SVM, and WASM. This altVM layer is ready to use out of the box, requiring minimal modifications to allow teams from non-EVM ecosystems to "copy and paste" their code onto Ethereum, while only needing to maintain a single codebase to minimize technical debt.

The Pontem team is a highly capable engineering team that has been deeply involved in the Move ecosystem of high-performance public chains since the Diem era. The team has now developed two mature products in the Aptos ecosystem: Liquidswap AMM and the Pontem wallet. These two products have an average of ~10,000 active addresses daily. Among them, Liquidswap has accumulated 8 million transactions, 700,000 unique addresses, and ~2 million USD in daily trading volume.

In summary, the development history of Pontem is a process where the wallet excels, leading to DEX, and then DEX excels, leading to parallel EVM.

The Pontem team has rich application development experience, so when designing Lumio's architecture, they pay great attention to ensuring developer sovereignty and providing developers with as much freedom as possible.

The design goal of Lumio is to support any chain and any VM, helping developers break free from the shackles of product supply chains. VM-level modularity allows developers to choose their preferred VM (SVM, EVM, MoveVM) to deploy their favorite L2 and L1, such as Optimism and Solana, without affecting performance and interoperability.

Lumio achieves shared state and unified liquidity for Dapps on Lumio with mainstream L2 by integrating foundational components such as OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbits' shared sequencer, and cross-chain bridges.

The shared state and unified liquidity between Lumio and L1 ecosystems like Solana are realized through cross-VM calls. The next step for the Pontem team is to support shared state and unified liquidity between Lumio and other L1 ecosystems like Bitcoin and Ton.

To achieve the above Lumio protocol design goals, Pontem has extensively reused components from OP Stack, particularly its RUST instances. Lumio's tech stack consists of the Magi node network developed by A16Z + Rust language Ethereum client Reth + OP Stack shared sequencer + altVM layer.

This tech stack design allows for the full utilization of the high performance and security features of parallel EVMs like SVM and MoveVM, while maximizing compatibility with EVM and consistency in UX (user interaction). The first mainnet iteration of Lumio, SuperLumio, can also be viewed as a superchain of OP.

This naturally creates a strong linkage between Lumio and other OP superchain projects, such as OP mainnet, Base, Aevo, Worldcoin, Redstone, Mode, etc., collectively forming a robust, prosperous, and diverse L2 ecosystem.

To be fair, compared to Monad and Movement, Lumio's parallel EVM implementation is a "glue" engineering thinking solution, with the advantages of being quickly available, developer-friendly learning curves, and stable reliability. Although it does not have the high concentration of new technological primitives as the first two, it remains an excellent and novel L2 scalability solution for Ethereum.

Finally, to add some details about Pontem's latest round of financing: In January 2024, Pontem announced a $6 million financing round led jointly by Lightspeed Faction (Faction) and Lightspeed Venture Partners. This financing also attracted participation from companies such as Pantera Capital, Aptos Foundation, Wintermute, Altonomy, Shima Capital, and Kraken Ventures.