The Role of Virtual Machines in Smart Contract Blockchains

Investors are often overwhelmed by the wealth of technical information available about blockchain projects and find it difficult to gauge how a particular network upgrade may impact their portfolios. In this article, we explain what the often-discussed Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is and provide context for the different ways the crypto investor may come across it in the news. A major upgrade is planned for the serenity phase of the Ethereum roadmap in which the network will move away from the EVM to a different virtual machine, called Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM). We project that this will significantly open up Ethereum’s ecosystem to a new generation of developers.