- Published on
Our vision for scaling the EVM ecosystem
- Authors
- Name
- merkle
- @merkle_mev
The EVM was built as a necessity to power the trusted compute platform we now call Ethereum. We believe the EVM is as big of an achievement as the blockchain itself, enabling composable, trustless innovation. This new VM has quickly risen to being a standard for building financial applications. State machines have always been privileged in the financial world, but the EVM made it mainstream.
However, Ethereum, like all EVM-based chains, is not scalable, by design. We believe there is a segment of the market that would benefit from having a safe, extremely fast EVM-powered financial platform.
Over the last few months, we have been building a unlimited-scale financial platform, powered by the EVM.
Sequencers are unscalable
No matter your TPS, sequencers do not scale. Only parallel asynchronous systems can scale to planet-level usage. Sequencers produce a single source of truth, shared by many applications. However, if used by all apps for their business logic, it becomes a bottleneck.
The sequencer should only be used for asset transfers between apps. Think of a sequencer as a bandwidth provider for liquidity.
Offchain is the future
We believe the future of EVM scaling is offchain. We are building a platform that allows for offchain execution of EVM code. This means that the base sequencer is only used for asset transfers, and the business logic is executed offchain in apps written in solidity executing in parallel.
The job of the sequencer is to enable offchain apps. As such, here are some of the features we are building:
- 0-finality: Transactions are always final as soon as they are seen by the sequencer.
- High TPS: Sequencer should be able to handle at least 100k TPS.
- Low latency: Transactions should be included in less than 100ms.
- Simple API Design: The sequencer API should be as easy to use as any REST API.
- 0-gwei gas price: 0-gwei gas price is the default.
Note: Apps can be written in any language, but merkle will provide a trusted execution environment for solidity apps, greatly improving developer experience.
A great way to think about this model is to compare it to the internet. The sequencer is the internet, and the apps are the websites. The internet is a dumb pipe, and the websites are the smart applications. Assets are content, and the sequencer is the bandwidth provider.
The merkle platform
merkle is building a ultra-secure, ultra-fast and ultra-scalable financial platform, powered by the EVM based on the above model. As such, we are taking drastic and controversial decisions:
Restricted deployment: The sequencer will have token factories and a token bridge, but new apps wanting to deploy on the sequencer will need to be reviewed and audited.
Governance: The sequencer will be governed by a DAO, with a token that is distributed to the community.
Apps: Apps will need to be either: (1) hosted on the merkle offchain app platform, or (2) be audited and reviewed by merkle.
Conclusion
It is important to note the merkle sequencer is not competing with Ethereum. Ethereum is a trustless, permissionless, censorship-resistant platform. The merkle sequencer is a permissioned and trusted platform. We believe there is a segment of the market that would benefit from having a safe, extremely fast EVM-powered financial platform.