According to an announcement made by Tomer Weller, the product manager of the foundation, on August 21, the Stellar Development Foundation has joined Bytecode Alliance, an industry group that supports the development of WebAssembly. Wasm is the rival of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) used by the Ethereum ecosystem and is also used in browser-based applications without blockchain infrastructure.
What are the Differences Between Wasm and EVM?
EVM is a virtual machine or computation engine used to execute smart contracts. Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Avalanche, and most other blockchain networks use EVM. However, a few networks like Polkadot, MultiversX, and Internet Computer use Wasm instead.
Stellar started as a payment network in 2014 but implemented smart contracts to provide more functionality to the network in 2022. In April 2022, Stellar developers chose Wasm as the computation engine. Despite the popularity of EVM, they argued that “storage and execution models are expensive and difficult to parallelize,” which makes transactions more expensive and hinders scalability.
Stellar also argued that Wasm is perfect for “highly hostile” environments like blockchain networks because it was initially developed for browser applications. This was another reason why the team chose Wasm instead of EVM. However, most of the development work for Wasm is carried out by the Bytecode Alliance, a non-profit organization consisting of internet companies such as Amazon, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. When Stellar chose Wasm as the computation engine, Dfinity, the Internet Computer developer, was the only member representing a blockchain network in the partnership.
Wasm Continues to Attract Attention
In Weller’s announcement on August 21, he argued that joining Bytecode Alliance would allow them to “influence standards and tools” within the Wasm development community, which is a “wise” decision. He emphasized that his goal is not only to represent Stellar but also to advocate for “the entire blockchain network and developers.” According to Weller, Stellar’s participation in the organization moves the Wasm ecosystem towards accommodating and supporting a wider range of applications such as smart contract platforms by considering the unique needs of the blockchain network and offline use cases:
“This effect moves the partnership towards hosting and supporting a wider range of applications like smart contract platforms by considering the unique needs of the blockchain network and hostile offline environments.”
The Wasm community continues to enter the Web3 world dominated by EVM. On April 3, the Astar network announced that it would deploy both EVM and Wasm contracts on the same network, allowing developers to use both virtual machines. Astar labeled this event as the “Wasm launch day.” On August 22, Binance announced that it would provide $2.2 million in funding for a zero-knowledge proof application platform called “zkWASMHub” that uses Wasm.
