(2019-10-30) Wood Polkadot Substrate And Ethereum

Gavin Wood: Polkadot, Substrate, and Ethereum. Parity is as committed as ever to supporting and bridging “Ethereum”, however it is intended, into Substrate and Polkadot. While we are creating Substrate and its associated smart-contract infrastructure to be the world’s most powerful and joyous framework for creating new blockchains and dApps, we absolutely understand that there are many who enjoy their home in Ethereum ecosystem

Our commitment takes three distinct projects, which I’d like to take some time to explain; a Polkadot/Ethereum public network bridge, a Substrate/Parity-Ethereum-PoA bridge and an Ethereum-compatible EVM smart-contract execution module in Substrate.

Polkadot/Ethereum Public bridge

There are obstacles to this, primarily the prohibitive price of gas for non-native crypto on the Ethereum mainnet.

Substrate/Parity-Ethereum-PoA bridge

For some projects however Polkadot/Ethereum interoperation is less important since they will be unable to deploy to the mainnet (due to scalability issues) anyway. Despite not deploying on the Ethereum (1.0) mainnet, these projects nonetheless prefer to remain strongly compatible with the Ethereum ecosystem for a multitude of factors

very similar to our existing Parity Bridge that sits at the heart of the xDAI chain

The infrastructure needed is much simpler in this case

Substrate EVM

Furthermore, by ditching the five-year-old Ethereum execution model, we can both simplify and speed up the codebase (by getting rid of flawed or overly opinionated EVM opcodes) and introduce economic efficiencies (like separating code-upload to instance deployment and introducing deposit-based state rent) onto the execution environment.

That said, reality dictates that sometimes features, performance and clarity must take a back seat to compatibility. For this, we are introducing Substrate EVM

Think of it as a whole Ethereum blockchain inside of a single SRML module, ready to be integrated into the rest of your custom blockchain.