Open Heart Surgery: Inside Ethereum's Crucial Replacement of the EVM

Stored across tens of thousands of nodes that make up the platform, the ethereum virtual machine, or EVM, is responsible for executing the countless tokens, dapps, DAOs and digital kittens of which the blockchain is comprised of.

It's an engine on top of which the entirety of ethereum operates, and it speaks in a language named "EVM bytecode" - raw, 256-bit strings of information that can deliver any conceivable equation.

The current EVM will be replaced by a new virtual machine called eWASM. EWASM is just ethereum's version of the WASM code, created by the World Wide Web Consortium, the team of developers responsible for maintaining and standardizing the web.

While an exact timeline for the switch isn't fixed, eWASM development is making rapid progress, and is gearing up to the launch of its testnet at Devcon 4, the ethereum developer conference, in Prague in October.

Case in point, most dapps developers program in ethereum's Solidity, a high-level programming language which automatically compiles into an EVM bytecode compatible form.

Nick Johnson, an ethereum core developer, agreed, telling CoinDesk that when he joined ethereum, it was immediately obvious to him that the EVM was built by developers with a deep understanding of computer science, but without much experience building broadly useable products.

For one, ethereum core developer Greg Colvin, who's been devoted to the EVM's upkeep for years, is reluctant to let the old code go.

Colvin had been designing a newly improved version of the EVM code himself, named EVM 1.5, which was originally intended to be the future of the ethereum virtual machine.

Conflicts aside, eWASM is gaining steam among many ethereum developers.

He continued, because of the nature of the sharding upgrade - which splits ethereum up into smaller, more manageable chunks - multiple virtual machines could eventually be supported on ethereum.