Announcing PolkaVM - a new RISC-V based VM for smart contracts (and possibly more!)

[natalie]

Hi @koute

It’s been on my list for a while to reply! First of all, thanks so much for driving the discussion so openly in the forum and sharing all of the stats Makes it very easy to follow and join the discussion.

From a product marketing perspective, I have one thing to add: I’d recommend using another name than PolkaVM, and something more descriptive (e.g. RISC-V VM).

Reasons:

1. The biggest reason: We would undermine one of the biggest selling points for not using EVM: EVM is proprietary, Web3 specific, etc., and we always sold WASM as a more widely-used standard, it’s open, more efficient, … - if we start saying “On Polkadot, we use PolkaVM”, people would think it’s proprietary and just another environment to learn.
   Using RISC-V is amazing, but “hiding” it behind a new name could not only harm your VM implementation, but also adoption of Polkadot (if the RISC-V VM is becoming the new standard).
2. Even as a general rule of thumb, we should avoid coming up with our own names if possible. The PD ecosystem is already infamous for its lingo, and if we have a chance to avoid another moment where people have to check a glossary, we should use it. We have so many special terms that can be easily explained by one single term from the industry:

When you want to build parachains (=appchains) on Polkadot, you can use pallets (=modules) from Substrate (=our SDK).

Maybe because smart contracts were never much in focus, we don’t have that lingo yet, and I’d pledge for keeping it simple and understandable too.

3. Calling it RISC-V VM (or something similarly descriptive) has the advantage, that for those who know the benefits of RISC-V, you ring the right bells, and save a paragraph of explanation. In your previous post, you mention the benefits of RISC-V:

@koute

• It’s free and open-source. Anyone can use it without any license fees.
• It’s very simple and orthogonal. At its bare minimum all of the required userspace RISC-V instructions fit on a single page.
• It’s modular and extensible. Parts of the ISA (e.g. multiplication, floating point support, atomics, SIMD, etc.) are entirely optional and can be enabled/disabled at will.
• It’s efficient and scalable. It is designed to scale from tiny low-power microcontrollers up to supercomputers with hundreds of CPUs.
• It is already well supported in rustc and LLVM and is gradually picking up steam in the industry.

→ These are amazing qualities we want to bring to people’s minds, and we don’t want to bring up the negative associations with a potentially proprietary VM like PolkaVM.

Curious what you (and others) think!