Author: intern, Monad team member; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou
After listening to the debate between Justin Drake and Anatoly, it seems that many people believe that the EVM will always dominate, mainly because of its lead and network effect moat.
In my opinion, the EVM lead is not as large as people think, and it is definitely not "insurmountable".
Assume that there are approximately 10 million active on-chain users per month (it may be less than 10 million, just using 10 million as an upper limit estimate).
Assume the potential market size is approximately 1 billion users in total.
Facebook's MAU (monthly active users) and DAU (daily active users) are 3 billion and 2 billion respectively.
Another example: Fortnite has 650 million registered players and approximately 125 million MAUs.
In fact, it must be a breakthrough application to break the leading position in the user dimension. Any chain that supports an app with a user scale of 100 million MAU will automatically become the number one used chain and establish a user network effect that exceeds the largest existing scale.
If we assume a current MAU of 10 million and a potential MAU of 1 billion in 10 years, that gives us a penetration rate of 1%, which is definitely not enough to conclude the debate and say that EVM has won.
In my opinion, scalability is extremely important to be able to power an app with 100M MAUs, and Solana is currently the best choice/market leader to win an app with that scale.
There are a lot of ongoing vertical attempts to extend the EVM (namely Monad, and why I thought it was important and chose to join the team initially), so it’s clear that SVM isn’t the clear winner here either.
But to declare the race over at this point and say the EVM won due to network effects is unrealistic.
If a successful breakout app goes viral and starts attracting millions of users, it may lose its user lead after 3 months.
Important note: There are many other network effects besides users, such as developers, development resources, TVL, mindshare and market cap, and a large amount of rich collateral to support upper-layer development, but if another VM gets 10x the users of all other chains, the above other components will likely follow.
Scalability is a prerequisite for mass user adoption, and increasing the scalability of blockchains/infrastructure is extremely important, and of course, it’s all based on the idea that at some point there will be a viral crypto app.
Scalability promotes an app to have a large number of users, and viral apps can indeed acquire a large number of users.
All of this to say is… the EVM’s current dominance is not insurmountable, and scaling the EVM will be critical to securing its future place in crypto in the long run.
If a breakout application emerges before the EVM scales, it’s likely that another VM will take over and gain a stronger network effect.
If a large number of users arrive, whoever can cope with the necessary user scale will have the greatest chance of winning.
