Deeper Dive for Why OpenEVM

Ecosystem
1

Hey All,

Wanted to put forward a more robust reason why we should pursue OpenEVM.

Let me first start my acknowledging the hesitancy of those opposed and recognize that the concerns are not without validity. With all of that said, I believe the pros far outweigh the cons, so let’s explore.

I am firm believer that Polkadot should generally not compete against other chains for multiple reasons: 1) Polkadot would be in a more privileged position, and 2) VCs may be hesitant to invest in projects if they believe Polkadot would copy the tech. However, I believe there are reasonable exceptions to this argument in this particular instance.

First, would Polkadot having a parachain with a smart contract platform on it go against industry standards? The answer is no. Ethereum has a smart contract on its base. Cardano has a smart contract on its base. Avalanche has a smart contract on its base. Therefore, the industry standard for a multi-chain system architecture is for the main project to have smart contract support.

Second, would we rug a VC investment who invested money in the development of a technology? The answer is no. Parity developed the EVM. No VC investment was made in developing this technology.

Third, I have read that this chain would be competing against Astar. I believe this statement to be false. Let me explain why. Does Astar have an EVM? Yes. However, Astar (forgive me if I mispeak) has a closed collator set and still has privileged access to Astar. Let me be clear. I do not point this out as an insult. My assumption is that Astar is running in essence a semi-closed system because of its corporate deals. In my experience working with corporations, they don’t care about permissionless or decentralization. They care about security and regulatory compliance. In order for them to achieve the latter, the collator sets need to be closed and the admin rights retained. This is Astar’s business model and they have every right to pursue their business model. The OpenEVM model that is being proposed would be permissionless. A permissionless EVM will attract a completely different clientele than one that is semi-closed; therefore, they are not in competition with each other.

Let me make some other points.

First, if we want to increase liquidity into the ecosystem, then Polkadot has to take the lead (not the parachains). Let me explain why this has to be the case. Look at Ethereum. Despite the multiple L2s on Ethereum, where does most of the liquidity reside? The answer is Ethereum base (not the L2s). Again, why? Because Ethereum is decentralized while many of the L2s are not. The L2s attract liquidity from airdrop hunters and business deals. Folks who want to protect their net worth stay on the decentralized system. Also, what is the liquidity in? The answer is ETH and by extension stablecoins as they act as trading pairs against ETH. In order for the parachains to be able to scale their liquidity then DOT has to scale in its “economic security”. Why? Because the liquidity comes from the base layer token and the subsequent stablecoin trading pairs as the base layer token gets larger.

Now I know what some folks are going to say. But some of the parachains are decentralized and they inherit Polkadot’s security. While this is true, this is only partially true. Because the parachains have incorporated governance pallets, any user who puts their liquidity on a parachain also has to consider the “social layer security” because of how governance works (upgradeability). This “social layer security” is driven by the parachain market cap and not by the Polkadot market cap. Therefore, a whale can’t put a $100M on a $100M market cap chain. I will be upfront in that I don’t know how the Magnet chain works, but if the governance does not reside with the DOT holders, it will have the same problem as parachains when whales look at the “social layer security”.

Second, the parachain teams need to work with Coinbase and Binance to get listings. Think that this is something Polkadot could also help with from the Treasury if we could do mass listings. Also, we need asset hub routing to be able to easily incorporate the tokens for the exchanges. I believe this was discussed a while ago. These are the two largest exchanges in the world and we have to have their business.

Well, those are my thoughts. Interested in any competing ideas, agreements, add ons, or potential pitfalls.

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You have made several interesting points.

Let’s start by agreeing on this: Polkadot is not Ethereum.

That being said, I would take it a step further and say smth very bold, perhaps Polkadot momentarily should be the developer platform for Ethereum and beyond.

I think OpenEVM is half way there. The need is clear. We see the liquidity (Ethereum) and we see the potential (Polkadot).

And so we build an on-ramp for Solidity developers.

In my humble opinion, I have been convinced that the on-ramp is not EVM and that it can be done with ink!. After talking to several Solidity developers they do not see going from Solidity to a Rust-like eDSL language as a hurdle if the use case to deploy to Polkadot is appealing enough.

And so we roll out the red carpet so they can build on us.

We then show them a whole new world: ink!, coretime, cross-chain interopability, ability to scale to a full-fledged dAppChain, we really pop their bubble.

BTW, have you heard of Pop Network? It’s a DOT powered smart contract chain, with primitives to elevate the power of Polkadot to smart contract builders. Developers can compile Solidity contracts using Solang and Pallet Contracts, with further Eth compatibility rolling out as the tech becomes available, but its main core offering is building contracts in ink! using the Pop API. Imagine writing contracts on Polkadot that elevate the power of Polkadot from a parachain level to the smart contract level without all the complexity: Pop API.

We are currently a DF Program candidate. If you think Pop would be useful in our ecosystem then please support us by liking or commenting here:

As an ex-Parity engineer, I have seen us turn away so many gifted developers, teams, and companies that wanted to build on us but we had no answer for: “How do I deploy on Polkadot?”.

With Pop Network, a dot-native chain, one can do this without sacrificing the power of Polkadot.

It is time to blurrrr the lines :v:.

6 Likes
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Nice. When is Pop networking going live?

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We are aiming to launch on Paseo as soon as it starts onboarding parachains!

1 Like
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Thanks for your attention to Magnet, I want to briefly introduce Magnet Network here. Magnet is a Smart contract platform that directly uses DOT as the gas fee, building on on-demand coretime model. we calculate the gas fee within our platform and place the coretime order automatically based on the gas we collected. therefore Magnet can get sustainable ability to continuously provide smart contract service to the polkadot community. and of course, we will directly use DOT as Gov token, don’t worry about that :laughing:

Btw, we are working on an exciting thing that we believe will introduce Polkadot technology to a wider audience with Magnet.