Introducing Trust EVM and the Future Development Path for the EOS EVM
Last week the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) held the EOS EVM Launch Event + AMA on the ENF Twitter Spaces. The keynote speakers at the event included the Founder and Executive Director of the EOS Network Foundation, Yves La Rose, the EVM+ technical lead from EOS Argentina, Matias Romeo, and the core member of EVM+ product team Dr.Yarkin Who.
The official product name of the EOS EVM was also announced during Yves’ keynote: Trust EVM. The Trust EVM will operate as an independent EOS project and has recently launched a developer preview on the Jungle Testnet. Developers interested in building on the Trust EVM were invited to join the Trust EVM developer channels on Telegram and Discord.
Keynote Speech by Yves La Rose, ENF Executive Director
Transcript:
The general idea with the ENF when I decided to create it and when it became somewhat of a vision, was that we saw that in the EOS ecosystem, there was a void, there was a need for an entity that could coordinate resources and that could essentially leverage all of the experience and the knowledge that the ecosystem had learned over the past four years, and really ramp things up to come and fill voids that were present at the time.
There are a few things that make the ENF very different, or unique, as compared to other foundations. What we see in other ecosystems is that most of them have foundations that were created at launch of the ecosystem, and they each got token allocations at the early onset, or at network launch. So the the EOS Network Foundation, in this regard, is quite unique because it came after the fact, it came into existence four years after the mainnet launched. And it is continuously accountable to the token holders, as it continuously seeks back a feedback loop to go back to the block producers, to the token holders, in order to justify its existence and essentially create this accountability mechanism to ensure that it continues creating value for the token holders.
Another thing that’s unique with EOS is it really highlights the power of Web3. So essentially, since firing Block.one and taking over the EOSIO codebase, the ENF has been taking a multi-pronged strategic approach to mature EOS into the best in class Web3 smart contract platform and blockchain ecosystem. In 2022, the ENF established multiple working groups across many areas of expertise, it published multiple research papers and outlining essentially over 75 enhancement proposals, formed an EOSIO development coalition, and recently that coalition has committed over $8 million of funding within its first year.
The idea behind the ENF was that it was coming to fill that void that existed, where there was no roadmap. Token holders in EOS, depending on what kind of stakeholders they were; whether they were builders, developers, or businesses, they didn’t really know where EOS was heading. This is really what set the foundation for the ENF to be able to come and address that void, that gap that existed so that people could see themselves in the vision and could see where EOS was heading for the first time in a very long time.
As part of that vision, as part of our mandate of ‘enabling developers, businesses, and individuals to build on EOS’, we also recognized that the ENF needed to secure the talent, essentially the developers, that have created the software stack itself. And so in the last couple of months, we’ve been securing the developers that essentially created the software. If you go look at GitHub, the ENF has entered into partnerships or has directly employed essentially the top 10 or so developers from the EOSIO ecosystem, and has started deploying them and placing them into positions to be able to leverage and amplify that core code base working towards that vision that we’ve set out a few months back.
One of the earliest priorities we set as the ENF was bringing full EVM compatibility to EOS. And so when the ENF got created late in August 2021, we set out to plan an aggressive roadmap and one of the highest priorities was the EVM. We knew that we needed to tackle that early because it would take time to actually come into deployment and this is why we’re here today.
So over the last four months or so, we have been developing the EVM in the background and we selected one of the top tier developer teams, EOS Argentina and Matias Romeo who is going to be giving a presentation later. It was an obvious choice to choose EOS Argentina and specifically Matias, because EOS Argentina had been developing on Graphene-based dPOS blockchains since BitShares. They were also a core contributor to the EOS MetaMask integration. Now, on top of bringing in a strong developer team, we wanted to ensure that the public good, the actual EVM compatibility, the code itself wasn’t simply put out into the public without any supporting product alongside it.
On top of securing a team to build the actual compatibility, we also secured a product team, including Dr. Who you’ll be hearing from later on. We secured a team that was a Y Combinator alumni, a team that essentially has experience in building products, strong products, to come and help. So in tandem building the actual public good (the EVM compatibility), we had a team that was working hand-in-hand to build the product side of things so that once the EVM launches, we will actually have products to go alongside it.
Introducing the Trust Network
I’m really excited to announce this, because we’ve been working on it for a couple of months, the name of the product itself. Now you have to give it a little bit of background. So EOS has lacked trust from many people in the blockchain industry for a long time. In part, and the big part. is due to Block.one’s broken promises and failure to its commitments to support the network as expected. Since its launch, the ENF has brought trust back into the leadership of the network into this community. And therefore today, I’m excited to announce that the official product name for the EOS EVM is Trust Network and the token ticker for its gas and governance token will be EVM, official Trust EVM token!
🪙 Welcome to TrustEVM‼️
🌿#TrustEVM is an Eth Virtual Machine based on the EOS network, offering a turn-key solution for developers to operate their apps on an full #Ethereum-compatible chain while enjoying the high throughput, scalability, security and reliability from EOS. pic.twitter.com/LssUVv3mHR
— Trust – EOS EVM (@TrustEvm) April 19, 2022
Opening Doors for New Developers
Now, people ask, why is the ENF focusing on EVM? Isn’t that outdated technology? Or isn’t Ethereum essentially capped and it won’t be able to scale? Well, you can have as much technology as you want, you can have as much power as you want, which we know we have in EOS, but what we lack is all the rest. What the EVM brings to EOS is essentially the ability to open the doors to an immense amount of developers that are in the blockchain ecosystem that have simply been eager and they’ve been hungry for that power, but they haven’t had a means to come into the EOS ecosystem and the EVM will open that door for them.
This is what’s going to become available with Trust EVM and we’re not talking about theoretical power. We’re not talking about in testnets or in controlled conditions, we’re talking about EOS, which has been live and battle tested over the last four years. It’s already powerful today, and this is before we’ve made improvements to the architectural design of EOS, which we’re currently doing. This is before we’ve actually optimized the nodes and the actual infrastructure underlying the block producers, which is happening in parallel to the EOS EVM.
Easier to use on EOS and enhance the adoption rate.
Trust EVM will allow for tokens to be held and transferred with only an Ethereum public key and MetaMask. No need to pay for an EOS account or a PowerUp for CPU every 24 hours required. All you need to do is pay a small amount of gas per transaction, and everything else will just work. The EOS resources are handled in the background by the RPC nodes pushing the EVM transactions onto the EOS blockchain to allow for a simple user experience.
Trust EVM is Dedicated to Benefiting EOS Holders
So how then do the EOS token holders benefit? Well, there are a few ways that they benefit, but I think that most important way is that the token holders themselves have subsidized the EOS EVM, and they’re therefore now shareholders into Trust EVM.
Part of the fees and part of the tokenomics that we’ve created with the EVM, part of that revenue will go back to the token holders. If in an ideal scenario, the EVM is incredibly successful and it’s capable of bringing in many developers back into this space, then that revenue that will be generated will directly offset the cost to the ecosystem that the ENF bears on it through inflation.
Synergies with Yield+ for Increasing TVL
The Trust EVM will also have synergies with other core pillars that we’ve created. For example, the Yield+ group will serve to complement the Trust EVM deployment, as it’ll provide an incentive model for existing DeFi and GameFi projects and open-source code written in Solidity to be easily cloned for or expanded to EOS with negligible development costs to do so. This will enable new projects to deploy quickly and focus their budgets on marketing and community building to track new users and TVL rather than engineering costs.
Over the coming months, you’re going to see EVM products and that you should expect to deploy over the coming months. Wallets, bridges, DEXes, a project launchpad, explorer, all of these functions will come online over the next quarter to come and compliment the function that has been created by the EVM itself.
I can’t be more excited about the future of EOS, especially with this EVM. It marks a major milestone in EOS’s path to becoming the best in class blockchain for highly scalable Web3 applications!
Keynote Speech by Matias Romeo, EVM+ Technical Lead
Transcript:
Before diving into the technical aspects of the EVM, I want to share with you what were our main objectives when we started planning EVM support on EOS. We set ourselves the goal to give developers the same user experience they are used to when using other main EVM chains. And this includes:
- Deterministic GAS billing
- EVM compatibility at the instruction level
- Full RPC compatibility
At the beginning of the project, we had two options regarding how to support EVM on EOS. One was to implement it as a part of the native EOS client and the other one was to implement it as a regular smart contract. Since EOS has a very efficient layer one virtual machine, and the protocol also allows for extensions, we choose to go the smart contract way.
For the EVM pre-compile contracts, which are computation intensive functions that are available to the EVM contracts, we are creating a protocol extension for EOS, which will implement them as new EOS intrinsics. This will increase the compatibility of implementation and also speed up the contract execution.
Going into some details on how the EVM on EOS works, it all starts when a user sends a signed EVM transaction that can be created by MetaMask or any other wallet or tool to the RPC server. Then the RPC server will wrap this transaction into an EOS transaction and send it to the EOS EVM contract. Then the EOS EVM contract will validate the EVM transaction, which was signed by the user and we’ll apply it in the state.
The EVM runtime contract, the one that is implementing the EVM virtual machine is based on the EVMOne Library, which is a fast open source C++ EVM implementation.
Interoperability Between Native EOS and the Trust EVM
The state of the EVM contract lives inside the EOS state, meaning that it’s accessible to the outside world and also to any other regular EOS contract. Having EVM support EOS will make a new run-time available to the chain. This will be one chain, two run-times, and this will allow EVM contracts to interact with EOS counterparts, opening up the possibility of many ways to interoperate. Like moving tokens between run-times, using trustless bridges, and many more.
EOS EVM Roadmap
We are very happy to be releasing this developer preview, but we also have many more things coming up in the future. So part of our roadmap ahead includes:
- Extend EOS client (nodeos) with custom plugins for the JSON RPC interface based on the Erigon architecture.
- Optimize EVM implementation to allow for greater transaction throughput.
- Finish protocol extension for ETH precompiled contracts support.
- The Graph integration with instrumented EOS client.
Keynote Speech by Dr. Yarkin Who, Trust EVM Product Lead
Yves and Matias already discussed some of the advantages of the Trust EVM project and I believe all of you know quite well about the ecosystem of the blockchain, but I still want to reiterate them in a more organized way so we can see why this EOS EVM combination carries a great promise.
As we all know, different features of the blockchain enables quite a lot of innovative business. Some rely on privacy from anonymity, some rely on tokens backed by the trust from consensus, some rely on the form of the “world computer”. This makes on-chain entities have a totally different operating and profit model compared to traditional companies. Additionally, the open-source nature of the blockchain world and token-based incentive models make blockchain ecosystems a more active and decentralized place than most people could ever have imagine before.
Secondly, we know there is an ongoing consumption boom of digital content in the blockchain world right now, especially for games and we also know there were and are a lot of games on EOS. This shows that EOS is technologically friendly to games, so with this EOS EVM project, we can bring the good gaming experience of EOS to the EVM world see what chemistry reaction will happen.
Last, but not least, with the high performance of EOS, we can make the web3 interactive experience closer to web2 in terms of latency. General web2 users may tolerate 1 second of latency when clicking something, but never 10 seconds. This latency is one of the key issues blocking the user migration from web2 to web3. Therefore, an EVM on EOS with the low latency from EOS will make it possible to introduce many popular dApps on Ethereum to web2 users. This will not only help generate high user growth, but also create more possibilities.
To better explore this possibility, to have better games, and better asset trading experience, we will need help from you, the community. We will organize hackathon projects for the new Trust EVM. Whether you have great new ideas, a cure for some long standing problems, or simply a better quality of life utility, welcome to join us toward a better EOS and EVM metaverse!
For users to follow Trust Twitter @TrustEvm, for developers to follow the developer channel in Discord or Telegram.
— AMA Session —
Question #1:
After the EOS EVM is officially launched, can the stability and speed of the EOS network be better addressed?
Answer from Yves:
EOS is already very stable as it has been battle tested in production for almost 4 years, but we’re always looking to make performance improvements. The EOS protocol will continue to improve as we develop new features such as API Transaction Lifecycle improvements as well as faster finality and synchronous calls among many others as outlined in the ENF Blue Papers and highlighted as priorities by the EOSIO+ Coalition. All of these improvements will benefit both native EOS as well as the EOS EVM.
Answer from Matias:
EOS mainnet has been tested in production and can process thousands of transactions per second without compromising stability and security. We believe that the EOS network could be competent enough to the task of supporting high-load EVM transactions.
Question #2:
Will there be some community cooperation plan in the future efforts of the EOS ecosystem?
Answer from Yves:
The ENF has established multiple avenues for community cooperation such as the Pomelo Grants platform, ENF Direct Grant Framework, and soon there will be a new program published by the Yield+ working group which will detail an EOS liquidity incentive program to attract on-chain TVL to both native EOS and the EOS EVM to kickstart the DeFi and GameFi ecosystems.
Question #3:
After making EOS compatible with Solidity, how can EOS establish a competitive advantage facing the existing EVM public blockchains and the recent popular non-EVM high TPS public blockchain like Solana? Will EVM compatibility undermine its own security?
Answer from Dr. Yarkin Who:
About the advantage on competition with other chains:
Firstly, about the ecosystem, we must thank Ethereum, Solana, and other projects’ efforts and contributions. We can see further because we stand on the shoulders of the giants. We will reach and cooperate with well-known projects, especially DeFi projects to introduce them to our EVM ecosystem. We will also try to make improvements to them based on the features of EOS to provide better user experiences.
Secondly, about user growth. As a matter of fact, the user number of Ethereum does not even reach 20% of that of web2.0, so there’s a lot we can do to attract new users. We will increase the support to the developer community, especially around GameFi and NFTs to incubate Trust EVM innovative dApps, contents, and hot topics to attract new users from the whole web2 population.
Last, from the contrarian investment point of view, though EOS did not perform well in the past, it still has quite good liquidity and a large space for the price to rise. This means we have a solid foundation and a large potential for ROI. In this sense, it’s quite a nice thing compared to other public chain projects, no matter for developers or investors.
Answer from Matias:
The short answer is “No”, supporting EVM on EOS will not undermine the current EOS network security. The EVM smart contract runs inside the EOS VM sandbox as any other regular contract. Also EOS EVM runtime is being tested for compliance and a security audit is planned with Sentnl and Slowmist.
Question #4:
It is said that achieving EVM compatibility is a great breakthrough for the EOS ecosystem while there are still two huge challenges for EOS. How to achieve EVM compatibility and come up with the best solution by the EVM working group? Could Matias or Yarkin introduce the EVM developer team to us and their advantages?
Answer from Matias:
EVM has a clear specification. The way we look at EVM compatibility is to pass all the compliance tests for the EVM. That’s our guiding principle.
Answer from Yarkin：
Trust EVM has a global team of innovative developers, led by the EOS Argentina team, as well as a group of talented developers, including support from Areg Hayrapetian, who is also the engineering director of the ENF. Matias, he is the expert in dPOS. Also other members are the developers from famous blockchain projects or excellent entrepreneurs of Y Combinator entrepreneurial projects. At the same time, we keep on working with senior technical talents in the industry as development or consulting teams. I will not list them one by one here.
When it comes to advantages, technically the EVM is not only related to Ethereum, but also related to the technology of EOS. We need to combine them perfectly and bring out the best performance of EOS.
Question #5:
We know that if any public blockchain wants to be successful, its ecology will have its own funding plan. I would like to know what is the funding plan of the EOS Network Foundation? How big is it?
Answer from Yves:
Firstly, Pomelo is a crowdfunding platform for the EOS ecosystem, which is the EOS version of Gitcoin. Public goods creators submit grant submissions in Pomelo and Season 2 is in full swing now. The total grants are now over $1,000,000 and everyone is welcome to join in.
Secondly, the ENF Grant Framework has been established. Grant proposals are accepted in three levels, each having different amounts and acceptance criteria. Each level of grants come with different requirements and benefits commensurate with the size and scope of the project and funding level in question.
In the past three years, there were insufficient funds in the EOS ecosystem, but since the establishment of the ENF in August last year, it has successively provided more than $10 million grants on EOS. I believe more measures will be taken in the future. Let’s wait and see.
Question #6:
Everyone knows that EOS is the best technology in all of blockchain and we’ve talked about some of the technological superiority about EOS EVM, but can you guys speak specifically to what new types of applications or changes or anything along those lines that are enabled by things like sub-second block time? The second question is if somebody could speak towards what the RPC compatibility really means. What is the relevance and significance of that?
Answer from Matias:
Supporting the EVM on EOS is not only about the virtual machine, right? You not only have to have that run-time working in a compacted way, but then for developers to interact with the chain, they need API calls that are kind of standard, which are implemented by regular Ethereum clients like Go Ethereum or Silkworm or any other Ethereum client. There are sets of API calls that are kind of a standard for the EVM ecosystem.
When we say that we aim to have full RPC compatibility, we mean that we want to support most of those calls, some of them are more complex than the others, but really makes the lives of developers easier. In fact, when you are interacting with MetaMask, with any EVM network, basically MetaMask is using that interface. So you can be EVM compatible, but if you don’t have a full RPC compatibility, you will be downgrading the quality of the product. So this is one of our major focuses, for the Trust EVM to be the most compatible EVM implementation and having full RPC compatibility.
Answer from Yves
And to add to the first part of the question, you asked about the advantages or and possibilities that open up with EOS EVM, and you mentioned specifically the 0.5 second blocks. So there’s two parts to that: One is the speed at which EOS is capable of processing those transactions, but it’s also the low cost at which it’s capable of doing, is what opens doors to things like next-gen GameFi. So even though when we look at the theme transactions, we look at costs sometimes that are quite prohibitive to be able to do multiple actions on chain, and then we look at EVM compatible chains that really come and offset some of those costs and really open up the possibilities. But we’re still talking about chains that are processing EVM transactions that are sometimes between 25 to 50 cents per transaction.
Although that might seem low in comparison to what you see on Ethereum, it’s still not low enough to be able to do things such as microtransactional DeFi very effectively and rapidly, or GameFi, where we’re talking about micro transactions where the difference between a 1 cent or 2 cents transaction can really make it difference in terms of whether or not the product is capable of being monetized and or capable of generating a profit while being able to do so on-chain. That’s really what EOS comes and enables, is that high throughput combined with those fast block times, then you’re able to really leverage the power of the EVM while not bottlenecking yourself with what you can’t potentially do on-chain.
Question #7:
I have two questions. The first one is EOS EVM similar to Telos EVM? And also as we have seen from the recent news that the EOS is forming a coalition with Telos along with other entities on upgrading EOSIO code… will EOS be cooperating with Telos to do marketing, for example, in order to attract more developers? And the second question is, as we have seen more and more chains being compatible with EVM, now we have a major issue that the developers are not willing enough to move to EOS, so how to tackle this?
Answer from Yves:
So there’s a few questions in there, I’m going to try to address them one by one. I guess the first one was is there overlap between Telos EVM and EOS’s EVM? So one of the things that we’ve mentioned on multiple occasions previously is that the Telos core developer group has been working hand-in-hand with Matias and his team, because what we want to work on is that the functions of both architectures, of Telos EVM and EOS EVM, essentially move in the same direction. So that ideally we are sharing a lot of the resources, we’re sharing a lot of the knowhow and the experience and that we’re moving in a similar direction because we share the same codebase essentially.
How EOS EVM differs at launch is with its full RPC compatibility. Now, Telos is also working towards that, and they’ve started this process much earlier in terms of their EVM deployment, but at launch, the EOS EVM will be fullly RPC compatible, whereas the current iteration of Telos EVM isn’t.
EOS EVM Media Coverage
Crypto News
https://cryptonews.com/news/eos-jumps-as-foundation-introduces-a-new-turn-key-solution-for-developers.htm
CryptoPotato
https://cryptopotato.com/eos-launches-evm-support-in-attempt-to-revitalize-platform/
CryptoSlate
https://cryptoslate.com/eos-community-delivers-ethereum-evm-support-to-revitalize-the-network/
Investing.com
https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/eos-launches-trust-evm-to-revolutionize-the-evm-dapp-ecosystem-2807852
Altcoin Buzz
https://www.altcoinbuzz.io/cryptocurrency-news/the-eos-network-foundation-introduces-trust-evm/
Bywire
https://bywire.news/articles/trust-the-evm-on-eos
EOS Go
https://www.eosgo.io/news/eos-welccomes-trust-network-evm
https://www.eosgo.io/news/the-founder-of-enf-trust-is-officcially-launched
https://www.eosgo.io/news/enf-evm-working-group-trust-achieve-full-rpc
Odaily
https://www.odaily.news/post/5178155
Chaincatcher
https://www.chaincatcher.com/article/2073051
Mars Finance
https://news.huoxing24.com/20220421112522655347.html
DeepChain News
https://www.dcnews.vip/a/170140.html
Tuoluo Finance
https://www.tuoluo.cn/article/detail-10097134.html
7 O’Clock Labs
http://news.7oclockcapital.com/articledetail.htm?id=2204210005
WebX Labs
https://www.webxlab.net/article/detail/5bA4zzvywy
Ccvalue
https://www.ccvalue.cn/article/1396311.html
EOS GO
https://www.eosgo.io/cn/news/eos-enf-yves-trust-evm-tvl
https://www.eosgo.io/cn/news/eos-enf-yves-trust-evm-rpc
Liandaodao
https://www.liandaodao.cn/toutiao/23906.html
Beeprotocol
https://beeprotocol.xyz/0xF49DB8e1F5D2
Wikibit
https://www.wikibit.com/zh-cn/202204218224979521.html
lianwin Finance
http://www.lianwin8.com/?p=17020
Weibo
https://weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309404760636256289835
Qukuaichain
http://www.qukuaichain.com/article-19573.html
Budao Finance
http://www.52budao.com/a/44551
Foreseezhoukan
http://www.foreseezhoukan.com/news/1066.html
Lianzhuge
http://www.lianzhuge.cn/20220421/364152.html
Blockwisdoms
http://www.blockwisdoms.com/news/2174.html
ForesightNews
https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/2506
Trust EVM Links
EOS Network
The EOS Network is a 3rd generation blockchain platform powered by the EOS VM, a low-latency, highly performant, and extensible WebAssembly engine for deterministic execution of near feeless transactions; purpose-built for enabling optimal web3 user and developer experiences. EOS is the flagship blockchain and financial center of the EOSIO protocol, serving as the driving force behind multi-chain collaboration and public goods funding for tools and infrastructure through the EOS Network Foundation (ENF).
EOS Network Foundation
The EOS Network Foundation (ENF) is a not-for-profit organization that coordinates financial and non-financial support to encourage the growth and development of the EOS Network. The ENF is the hub of the EOS Network, harnessing the power of decentralization as a force for positive global change to chart a coordinated future for EOS.
