What’s in a VM? The Execution Engines Powering Web3’s Future
summary
EVM proves minimal and now shows limits: EVM 256-bit stack makes CPU mapping slow and is poorly suited for ZK proof generation or heavy crypto, so alternatives appear — BPF → Solana’s SVM, Move VM token-aware safety in Sui, WebAssembly with instrumentation for gas metering (Polkadot, NEAR, Cosmos), and RISC‑V adoption in Kusama. Zero‑knowledge VMs trade EVM compatibility for much faster proving, and native register designs enable JIT compilation; PVM JIT shows orders-of-magnitude speedup over interpretation.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Virtual machines in Web3
- 1:16Blockchain needs VMs
- 4:14VM core components
- 8:44Sandboxing and gas metering
- 11:48Blockchain VM landscape
- 14:45VM memory architectures
- 17:28Word size and endianness
- 18:58EVM slowness and alternatives
- 19:45ZK VMs for rollups
- 21:57Interpretation vs compilation
- 23:52Conclusion and Q&A
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