EVM Pallet
FRAME provides an EVM execution module that allows unmodified EVM code to be executed in a Substrate-based blockchain.
EVM Engine
The EVM module uses SputnikVM as the underlying EVM engine. The engine is overhauled so that it's modular. In the future, we will want to allow users to swap out components like gasometer, and inject their own customized ones.
Execution Lifecycle
There are a separate set of accounts managed by the EVM module. Substrate based accounts can call the EVM Module to deposit or withdraw balance from the Substrate base-currency into a different balance managed and used by the EVM module. Once a user has populated their balance, they can create and call smart contracts using this module.
There's one-to-one mapping from Substrate accounts and EVM external accounts that is defined by a conversion function.
EVM Module vs Ethereum Network
The EVM module should be able to produce nearly identical results compared to the Ethereum mainnet, including gas cost and balance changes.
Observable differences include:
- The available length of block hashes may not be 256 depending on the configuration of the System module in the Substrate runtime.
- Difficulty and coinbase, which do not make sense in this module and is currently hard coded to zero.
We currently do not aim to make unobservable behaviors, such as state root, to be the same. We also don't aim to follow the exact same transaction / receipt format. However, given one Ethereum transaction and one Substrate account's private key, one should be able to convert any Ethereum transaction into a transaction compatible with this module.
The gas configurations are currently hard-coded to the Istanbul hard fork. It can later be expanded to support earlier hard fork configurations.
Next Steps
Learn More
- Learn about our Contracts pallet, which supports deployment and execution of Wasm smart contracts.
Examples
References
Visit the reference docs for the EVM module.
Visit the reference docs for SputnikVM's
evmcrate.