Interpretation of the new popular project Movement: Parallel EVM + Modular Execution Layer

Parallel EVM has become a new hot word recently. We know that improving TPS has been a tireless pursuit in the past few years. Layer2 represented by Rollup technology has been launched one after another. Parallel EVM can expand TPS to millions, and its value is no less than L2.

In comparison, parallel EVM is still in its early stages. Compared to Layer2, parallel EVM has recently attracted attention from investors, such as Movement Labs, which received $38 million in funding in April this year.

Some people may ask, is it necessary to continuously improve TPS with the current active users on the chain? The answer is: it is very necessary. Only by continuously improving the infrastructure can we ensure that the technological innovation on the application side can take place. Improving the performance of the public chain is like humans always pursuing faster CPU/GPU hardware or faster Internet speeds. It seems to be engraved in human genes. Imagine how the mobile Internet revolution could have occurred in the 2G era of text messages. In the blockchain industry, whenever TPS is increased to a certain level, new application innovations are likely to emerge.

In terms of improving TPS, we have made many efforts, some of which were successful and some failed. For example, we tried to increase the block size, which led to the fork of BTC into BCH and BSV, adopted a new consensus mechanism, reduced the block time, etc., but it was probably gradually matured and landed in the previous cycle. In the last cycle, the Rollup public chains dominated by the four kings were landed one after another. This cycle may be the improvement and landing of parallel EVM.

What is parallel execution?

Speaking of parallelism, there must be serialism. Serialism is to proceed in order, one by one. Let's take a simple example to explain the difference between serialism and parallelism. Suppose you want to travel to Huangshan now, and there is only one ticket gate at the entrance. All people can pass through one by one and take turns to check their tickets. This is serialism. During holidays, because there are many people, the scenic spot directly opens 10 ticket gates, so tourists will be arranged in 10 different places, and the passing efficiency will increase 10 times. This is called parallelism. Our computers can work in parallel, so our blockchain should be able to work in parallel.

Most of the public chains based on ETH are now serial. Although parallelism has great benefits, it is also very difficult to implement in the blockchain world. For example, address A now has an ETH transfer to address B. The transfer processing takes a certain amount of time. During the processing time, if address A does something malicious, it can process an ETH transfer to address C in parallel. Then both B and C will receive an ETH. Therefore, parallel processing is not as simple as detailed. The industry has proposed three execution mechanisms to solve the conflict problem of parallel execution: message passing mechanism, shared memory mechanism and strict state access list mechanism. The professional content will not be expanded here. If you want to study in depth, you can refer to the article

https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/57500

Of course, parallel execution is not so unfamiliar. Solana, Aptos and Sui, which are built with Move language, are all parallel execution. Their TPS can easily exceed 10,000. However, they are not EVM-compatible and have their own virtual machines, which makes the whole world seem to be split. The purpose of parallel EVM is to achieve both EVM compatibility and parallel execution.

There are roughly two directions for parallel EVM

The first is to make the current public chain that is executed in parallel compatible with EVM.

For example, Neon is an EVM simulator on the Solana network. It can convert Ethereum transactions sent by the dApp front end into Solana transactions through a proxy, and then execute them in the simulator to modify the on-chain status.

The second is to add parallel execution capabilities to the EVM system.

The second type can be divided into two subcategories. The first subcategory is to use the virtual machine of the existing public chain for parallel execution. There are three types of mature applications, namely Solana, Aptos/Sui of Move language, and UXTO model of Bitcoin. For example, Movement Lab is a virtual machine that references Move, executes transactions on it, and then settles on Ethereum. It is a bit like the reverse operation of Neon.

Lumio aims to be the first VM abstraction that will support any VM, including SVM, parallel EVM, MoveVM, and plans to support other ecosystems such as ton and Bitcoin, allowing developers to deploy using any virtual machine on any chain.

Monad belongs to the second category, and it writes its own parallel execution logic. Monad introduces two mechanisms to the Ethereum virtual machine: one is superscalar pipeline technology, and the other is improved optimistic parallel mechanism. The superscalar pipeline technology parallelizes the execution stage of the transaction. The current performance reaches 10,000 TPS.

Movement Lab

Move is a secure and reliable programming language designed by Facebook for smart contracts, emphasizing ownership and security. Assets in Move are represented as resources. Due to Move's powerful ownership model and clear resource capabilities, Move simplifies the development of secure smart contracts for common blockchain tasks such as asset transfer ownership, minting, and destruction.

Sui and Aptos chose to develop an independent public chain based on Move. The problem they encountered was that this was a completely new language for EVM developers. Movement Lab introduced the Move execution environment into Ethereum Layer2, which has the EVM ecosystem and the advantages of the Move language.

Movement Lab's flagship products are the M1 and M2 networks, and a powerful set of tools to support them. The M2 mainnet will be launched, and it will be the first Layer 2 solution based on the Move language on Ethereum. It will support multiple Move implementations, including Sui Move and Aptos Move, as well as our embedded EVM interpreter MEVM. This will enable developers from a variety of ecosystems (including Sui, Aptos, and EVM-based platforms) to take advantage of our L2 solutions.

One of the key features of M2 is its EVM parallelization capabilities. By leveraging the Move language and Sui's parallelization model, we can achieve high throughput and low latency for EVM transactions. This is achieved through object-centric storage and the ability to execute transactions in parallel. The EVM parallelization approach involves converting EVM bytecode to Move bytecode, which is then executed in parallel. This conversion process preserves the semantics of the original EVM code while enabling it to take advantage of the parallelization provided by the Move language and Sui execution model.

To promote the growth and adoption of the Movement Lab network, the team is also developing the Movement SDK, Movement CLI, Fractal, and Hyperlane messaging infrastructure. These tools will provide developers with the necessary resources to easily build and deploy applications on the platform. It is fully EVM-compatible, so it only takes 10 minutes to deploy Uniswap or any smart contract on the platform.

From the perspective of the hottest modules now, Movement Lab belongs to the execution layer, based on the excellent performance and security of MoveVm. Anyone can start any Layer2, and can choose Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, Polygon CDK, Celestia, EigenLayer and NEAR as DA, and then use Movement Lab's VM for execution and connect to the shared sorter.