A nonprofit called Iota is innovating in smart contract handling with Ethereum block chains, partly in reaction to high gas fees.
Tom Farren at Cointelegraph reports on something called ‘Iota smart contracts’ that is enabling different kinds of on-chain functionality appealing to a widening ETH-holding audience, particularly in the age of the NFT.
The vehicle, Farren reports, is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is a sandboxed stack built into an individual Ethereum node. It is essentially the runtime for smart contracts on Ethereum.
When EVM parses logical operations or completes other code aspects in its environment, it is isolated from the exterior blockchain.
“The EVM is a ‘world computer’ with its own permanent data storage and decentralized nodes across the globe handling millions of executable objects,” writes Nicolas Tang at Phemex. “It also has a stack-based architecture, storing all in-memory values on a stack, and works with a word size of 256 bits to enable elliptic curve operations and native hashing. The EVM has many addressable data components, such as an immutable program code ROM containing the executed smart contract bytecode and a volatile memory with each location initialized to zero. … it has no scheduling capacity, making Ethereum similar to a single-threaded world computer without a system interface handling or hardware support.”
All of this EVM handling, Iota says, is intended to lower fees…
“IOTA Smart Contracts also enable the feeless transfer of assets across chains, which offers the IOTA ecosystem — and anyone else interested — unprecedented opportunities in terms of utility, composability, and scalability,” Iota CEO Dominick Schiener reportedly told Cointelegraph.
Specifically, tailoring fee components is likely to have an impact on what developers pay for certain transactions.
Keep an eye on what these innovators are doing in smart contract handling as Ethereum continues to grow in popularity, partly because of EVM and everything else built into its unique blockchain.