Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)

Home

Glossary

A Turing-complete virtual machine that enables execution of code exactly as intended; it is the runtime environment for every smart contract.

What Is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)?

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a computation engine which acts like a decentralized computer that has millions of executable projects.

It acts as the virtual machine which is the bedrock of Ethereum’s entire operating structure.

It is considered to be the part of the Ethereum that runs execution and smart contract deployment.

The role of the EVM is to deploy a number of extra functionalities to the Blockchain to ensure users face limited issues on the distributed ledger.

Every Ethereum node runs on the EVM to maintain consensus across the blockchain.

Ethereum facilitates something called smart contracts, a piece of code that is running on Ethereum.

EVM is completely isolated meaning the code inside the EVM has no access to network, file system or other processes.

Ethereum has two types of accounts: Externally Owned Accounts (EOA) and Contract Accounts, both of which are treated equally under the EVM.

Account abstraction tries to reduce this to just one account meaning both EOAs and Contract Accounts function like each other.

EOAs are controlled by private keys, meanwhile contract accounts are stored in the smart contracts, also known as smart wallets.

A contract which is written in the smart-contract coding is converted into something called a bytecode.

Most of the source code for using smart contracts is done using programming language from Solidity.

It is then converted into opcodes for the EVM to interpret.

The EVM then uses the operation codes in order to complete certain tasks.

So, the EVM works like a large decentralized or master computer to complete all types of tasks on the blockchain.

EVM is one of the biggest projects in the world of cryptocurrencies.