Parallel EVM: A New Direction to Break Through Blockchain Performance Bottlenecks

The performance of blockchain networks has become a bottleneck for further industry development. With the rapid growth of transaction volume, there is an urgent need for new performance enhancement solutions to meet the requirements of "high performance, low fees". Against this background, parallel blockchain has emerged.

Parallel EVM is mainly divided into two categories: single-chain blockchain and modular blockchain. Single-chain blockchain can further be divided into L1 and L2. L1 is a new public chain with built-in parallel execution capabilities, represented by projects such as Sei v2, Monad, and Canto. L2, on the other hand, provides cross-ecosystem cooperation scalability by integrating the capabilities of other L1 chains, represented by projects like Neon, Eclipse, and Lumio.

The technical implementation of parallel EVM mainly includes two aspects: virtual machine and parallel execution mechanism.

1. The virtual machine is a virtual process virtual machine for distributed state machines, used to execute smart contracts.

2. Parallel execution refers to executing multiple transactions simultaneously, ensuring that the final state is consistent with the result of serial execution. There are mainly three mechanisms:

• Message Passing: Each executor can only access its own private data and interact through message passing.
• Shared Memory: Includes two models: memory lock model and optimistic parallelization.
• Strict state access list: Implemented parallel execution based on the UTXO model.

The current parallel execution schemes adopted by various projects are as follows:

• Sei v2: Optimistic Parallelization
• Monad: Superscalar Pipeline + Optimistic Parallelization
• Canto: Optimistic Concurrency
• Fuel: Strict State Access List based on UTXO Model
• Neon: EVM emulator on the Solana Blockchain
• Eclipse: Solana Execution + EVM Settlement
• Lumio: Move VM Execution + EVM Settlement

The development of parallel EVM is driven by internal growth within the industry, while also requiring high attention to potential security issues. Each project has both commonalities and unique features in their technical implementations. In the future, more L1 and L2 projects will join the competition of parallel EVM, bringing faster speeds, lower costs, and higher efficiency to Web3, further promoting the prosperity of the industry ecosystem.