Forward the Original Title: The Great VM Evolution

Imagine this: you’re about to call it a night after a rollercoaster of a day onchain. +$6.9k PNL on your ETH long, and a casual 42x on the AI Agent coin that’s “supposed” to cure cancer. But deep down, you feel like your soul’s being crushed. Why? It’s the EVM.

Every single time you use the EVM, you think to yourself… how did we get here? Every transaction feels like tiptoeing through a minefield. You wonder, how’s it 2025 and we still haven’t figured out a way around the clunky and dangerous approve-deposit pattern?

What’s worse? You live in constant fear of the infinite approval on your favorite DEX coming back to bite you — or being one honeypot meme away from losing your life savings. If this sounds familiar, you’re living in the past.

But let’s be fair, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) isn’t all bad. The dramatic rant above serves well to grab your attention and satisfy the literary in us but the reality is much more nuanced.

In reality, the EVM has been the cornerstone of programmable blockchains and historically the most useful and innovative dApps have been written in Solidity for the EVM! Think Uniswap, think Aave, think GMX, think CryptoKitties. But, it’s time the dominant reign of the EVM comes to an end.

The time has come for the king to gracefully share the territory with a bunch of promising up and comers. MoveVM, CosmWasm, SVM, FuelVM, Arbitrum Stylus and so many more bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the table and the developers are starting to pick the VM that best suits their use-case.

Trust us, it’s not just a case of shiny-object syndrome where developers are chasing a new meta, this shift has been substantiated by carefully watching the EVM for years, understanding what it does well and what it isn’t great at, and making an informed decision. The new wave of VMs have learned and started from a better starting point.

What Does the EVM Do Well?

• Network Effects, Ecosystem, and Mature Dev Infrastructure. The EVM has had a massive head start which has resulted in it being the go-to choice for most developers, no second thoughts. Why wouldn’t it be? The EVM has a substantial userbase, more apps, more liquidity, and developer tools that are massively ahead of the altVMs.
• Institutional Integrations. CEXs and Custodians are requirements once chains reach scale. These integrations from 3rd parties are often done by slower-moving larger entities that have already integrated countless EVM chains.
• Trial By Fire. Over countless hacks, Solidity and EVM continuously become more and more resilient and battle tested. It’s great to have security in theory, but nothing comes close to being alive for years and actively patching security loopholes.
• Economic Forcing Function. With the EVM being home to nearly $90 billion in DeFi assets and the trend not looking to stop with new major chains opting for the EVM — Monad, Hyperliquid, MegaETH, Berachain — there’s a huge economic force driving the EVM to be better and improve to serve the liquidity.

Why Does the EVM Suck?

• Security Is Weak Sauce. Even though it goes through “trial by fire,” there’s space for altVMs to come in and start from a higher baseline of security, simply making several app and protocol level bugs impossible. Even the competent solidity devs end up shooting themselves in the foot and attack vectors that auditors must dig through are daunting..
• Performance Lacks Luster. The legacy EVM doesn’t play well with high-throughput. It’s too inefficient. Projects like@monad_xyz""> @monad_xyz and @megaeth_labs are attempting to change that, but both of their approaches come with hefty trade-offs. Either they rewrite the stack entirely (Monad), sacrificing battle-tested reliability, or they make compromises on decentralization (MegaETH).

• Gas Golfing Ain’t For the Weak. It’s a subpar system when developers need to spend more time optimising for gas efficiency than actually building their protocol. Plus, significant optimisations often come from writing assembly, which is a nightmare and I don’t think I need to elaborate on why. Sometimes even changing the order of function definitions in a SC can yield gas optimizations, there’s a black magic to this art.

Well, despite all its flaws, the EVM just works and will continue to retain dominance for years to come. But think of it like this, $BTC is the dominant crypto asset but that doesn’t mean there isn’t space for thousands of different crypto assets to co-exist with $BTC, as they do.

Apart from that, there’s a huge ecosystem of developers who’re day-in and day-out working to improve the user experience offered by EVM through account abstraction, batch transactions, and even a new solidity compiler. There’s immense work happening at every level of the stack to improve the EVM.

But if our optimism serves us well, the amount of developers in crypto will increase 1000x from hereon now at the least, and we can’t expect the EVM to serve them all. Think about Web2 for a minute, there’s no one single programming language that suits every single use-case well, or a single language that every developer likes to use, neither can we expect them to.

With that being said, let’s roll into understanding altVMs.

It’s Time for VM Expansion — altVMs 🤝 EVM

We get it, beliefs ain’t easy to break. When your favourite CT researchers tell you that the EVM works just fine, and question the very existence of altVMs, it’s natural to take their word for it. But, let us take you through the flipside of that argument by directly fighting the FUD first.

The AltVM FUD.

• Why do we need altVMs? EVM just works. You know if we just gave up and accepted the status quo when things just work, we wouldn’t ever have the nicer things in life. AltVMs represent ambitious experiments and a step forward, they represent a step towards evolution of how we build crypto apps. Competition helps breed the strongest.
• AltVMs narrative is VCs chasing a new meta. No, it’s not and there’s proof against it. CosmWasm has been the choice of VM on several Cosmos-based chains for years, Solana’s SVM being used to handle an insane amount of scale and liquidity, and even Sui & Aptos collectively serve $2.7B+ TVL on the MoveVM. These are very real signs of traction and PMF rather than a smoke screen.
• Onboarding users is tough. Yes, they currently need to download a new wallet, learn to read a new explorer, build new mental models but—

1. Firstly, users flock to where the opportunity is, and chains with altVMs often represent underrated opportunities and that’s how the initial flywheel kicks-off. Users aren’t dumb, you just have to make it worth their while to go through the learning curve.
2. Second, Initia solves this. BYOW—Bring Your Own Wallet. Whichever Interwoven Rollup you choose to use, irrespective of the VM on the rollup, you have the freedom to use your wallet of choice from Rabby to Phantom to Keplr.
3. Third, Chain Abstraction is starting to become reality. Gas sponsorship, interop, et al. have been solved in 2024. In 2025, the barriers to enter new applications irrespective of the chain or VM will be driven to 0.

• The developer tooling woefully disappoints. We agree, but it’s also important to understand that these tools are new and constantly evolving at a rapid pace. Once they hit escape velocity, you’ll start seeing significant improvements in the developer experience.

Why AltVMs Will Thrive in The Long Term

Now that we got the nasty stuff out of our way, let’s refocus on the positives, there’s a lot to get through. AltVMs ultimately represent a new path for creativity and opportunity in the blockchain app space. They bring fresh paradigms, novel ideas, and a higher baseline of security to the table. Let’s dive into why altVMs are exciting:

New Mental Models

The keen observers would notice, through the past cycle most of the innovation in blockchain apps has been off-chain — whether it be the interface, the incentives, or bridging the gap for exogenous yield to flow into crypto. Onchain innovation has plateaued. We want to see more fiveoutofnine caliber developers that experiment onchain and truly push the boundaries of what’s possible.

But, the EVM has pigeon-holed developers into rigid mental models, limiting creativity. AltVMs bring variance and offer the developers a change of pace. AltVMs break the prior constraints and enable developers to think differently about building onchain apps.

This effect recently is most notable with Arbitrum Stylus and Sui Move.

Arbitrum’s Stylus is a WASM-based execution environment that lets developers build smart contracts in Rust, C++, and theoretically any language that can compile to WASM. We’re already seeing the effects of Stylus in practice!

Renegade is a first of its kind DEX, it’s an onchain dark pool — slippage free, zero MEV, and private trading. After exploring several options, Renegade chose to go with Stylus because every other option for their protocol would literally be too expensive to use for the users. Read more about the case study here.

Now, a look at Sui’s MoveVM. It introduces the concept of Programmable Transaction Blocks (PTBs), which allow developers to compose interactions across multiple modules into a single transaction offchain and send it! No need for account abstraction to be able to batch transactions or wait for a contentious EIP to be added to the EVM, you can have the UX benefits today by simply building on Sui! Read more about it here.

High Baseline Of Security

Most altVMs of today are built with security as a core guiding principle. They’ve had the advantage of seeing where the EVM fails and design to avoid those flaws right at the foundation. It’s not to say that they’re airtight, there could definitely be undiscovered hacks and flaws that we find out later in the timeline, but they do outshine EVM in security today!

Moreover, most of the altVMs build on top of Rust as a base, which is notorious for being an extremely secure language that’s heavily used to write mission critical software. Again, security right at the foundation.

Still not convinced? Peak at MoveVM — the VM used on the Initia L1.

To start, Move is the only language in crypto that was actually created by a team with deep understanding and experience developing new programming languages from scratch.

There are features baked into the language that force the developers to think through their programs better and allows for representation of program state that’s closer to reality. For example:

• Assets are “resources” owned by an address which represent the true ownership of assets in contrast to how there would be a mapping on balances in the EVM.
• Strict ownership semantics inherited from Rust make sure that the developer has to seriously think through their state management as the language requires them to precisely define what parts of the data can be mutated, and where.

And if you as a developer still manage to shoot yourself in the foot? You have formal verification to save your soul. Move ships with an inbuilt formal verifier through which you can mathematically define the behavior of your program and the verifier will tell you if your code doesn’t match up to what you intend to do. This significantly reduces the scope for logical errors.

Built For Performance

AltVMs are literally designed to be blazing fast. We’re pretty sure performance wasn’t the top concern when Lord Gavin was hunched over his laptop trying to churn out the first iteration of the EVM & Solidity. Sure, the EVM has come miles ahead from where it started but oh boy it’s no match for the fresh and new altVMs.

As we mentioned, the legacy EVM doesn’t play well with parallelization, and parallelization is the most effective lever for chains to increase performance. Parallelization with the EVM is still possible though, but it comes with a massive tradeoff if you want to do it well — you need a team of ex-Jump engineers to rewrite the entire thing…

First, what is parallelization? Simple, instead of processing transactions one-by-one, multiple transactions get processed together.

Modern VMs are designed with parallelization in mind, they thrive on it. Specifically, the programming paradigm offered by Move and Solana’s VM are to make parallelization as slick as possible.

Looking at SVM, every single piece of data is grouped under different accounts. Developers can choose to spread out data into different accounts with as much granularity as they want, and the data is decoupled from the execution logic, the program. With every transaction, developers need to specify which accounts they’re going to read and write from. This level of separation allows the VM to identify the transactions that don’t contest for the same resources and parallelise them.

By now, after first fighting the concerns and then systematically laying out the benefits of altVMs, you should be able to see why they are highly EV+ for crypto and for the generations of apps to come.

It’s not tribal and you shouldn’t lay your life on the line for a certain VM. Every VM has its pros and its cons, ultimately developers should be given the freedom to choose between what they like best and what suits their applications most. Experimentation is good for everyone in the industry!

These are the choices that actually matter when building applications and why Initia currently supports MEWing — MoveVM, EVM, and CosmWasm.

The truth is, we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s happening in the AltVM space so far. From zkVMs to hybrid environments bundling different VMs together, to attempts like FuelVM solving for state bloat, the future of apps is bright. It should get you up and dancing when you think of how the apps of tomorrow will leverage these tools at their disposal to build novel experiences, use-cases you’ve never seen before, and do it all for cheaper!

We’re simply at the beginning of the S curve of the AltVM Evolution.

Looking Beyond AltVMs: Enter Full-Stack Apps.

Time to take a step back. With all the tooling, with all the discourse — what’s the end goal? The real aim is to build products and experiences that deliver immense value to the users — whether through blazing performance, airtight security, or a seamless experience.

At the end of the day, VMs are simply another tool in a developer’s toolbox to leverage.

But, are they the best tool to get to our goal? They’re certainly a piece of the puzzle, but not the puzzle itself. VMs — be it EVM or AltVMs — do not get us over the line when used in a shared, general-purpose, environment.

Apps built on shared state monolithic chains are always going to have a hard time competing against apps built on top of purposeful, dedicated, custom infrastructure.

The real evolution lies in Full-Stack Apps.

The real evolution lies in choosing the right VM for your use-case and pairing it with a custom tailored appchain. Full-stack apps allow developers to build without compromise. They lead us to a future where developers take full control of their execution environment, a world where developers don’t choose a blockchain but craft one tailored to their app’s exact needs to build the best experience possible — from having dedicated blockspace to customizing transaction execution and ordering. They represent freedom and the next evolution.

At Initia, we truly believe full-stack apps are the single biggest step-function unlock to build novel products. To back this belief, we’re leading the charge by offering builders the best framework to build full-stack apps: they can select the VM that best aligns with their vision — whether it’s the security of Move, the ecosystem of the EVM, or the flexibility of CosmWasm, get instant access to interop through LayerZero & IBC, easily alter the lower-level chain stack with Cosmos SDK, and have everything else they’d ever need neatly packed into The Interwoven Stack: oracles, Celestia DA, explorers, Native USDC, onramps, wallet modals, bridge UIs, and more.

With Initia, full-stack apps are not just accessible — they’re practical.

We’ll leave you with this little teaser on full-stack apps and appchains, the article has been a Trojan Horse to prime you for the next one where you no doubt won’t leave before being pilled.

Disclaimer:

1. This article is reprinted from [Initia]. Forward the Original Title: The Great VM Evolution. All copyrights belong to the original author [@initia]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute investment advice.
3. The Gate Learn team translated the article into other languages. Copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited unless mentioned.