EVM-Compatible Chains Overview

• EVM-Compatible Chains are blockchain networks that replicate Ethereum’s virtual machine to execute smart contracts and support established developer tools.
• They implement diverse architectures with varied consensus mechanisms, state storage solutions, and APIs to ensure efficient cross-chain interactions.
• Ongoing research focuses on scalability, interoperability, and security challenges, employing techniques such as rollups, asynchronous execution, and formal validator protocols.

An EVM-compatible chain is a blockchain network that supports the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) instruction set, allowing it to execute smart contracts written for Ethereum, interact with standard tooling (e.g., Web3.js, Hardhat, and MetaMask), and implement existing dApp codebases without modification. EVM-compatible chains constitute a rapidly expanding and technically diversified sector of the Web3 ecosystem, including rollups, sidechains, consented Layer 1s, and experimental testnets. Their compatibility with EVM fosters code reuse, cross-chain dApp migration, and shared developer tooling, while also introducing challenges in terms of interoperability, security, economic design, and state management.

1. Architectural Foundations of EVM-Compatible Chains

At their core, EVM-compatible chains replicate the Ethereum execution environment, which is defined by the EVM's bytecode specification, account model, and state transition logic. Network architecture varies, but all implementations feature a block-processing pipeline with the following critical components:

• EVM Interpreter: Executes bytecode derived from Solidity or Vyper contracts, typically using optimized stacks such as evmone or custom C++/Rust implementations.
• Consensus Mechanism: Determines transaction ordering and finality, ranging from classical Ethereum PoW/PoS to advanced BFT hybrids (e.g., Autobahn in Sei Giga (2505.14914)).
• State Storage: Manages the global state using Merkle Patricia Tries, with storage backends like LevelDB, RocksDB, or custom structures (e.g., sled in 1DLT (2208.07665)).
• APIs and Tooling: Supports Web3 RPC endpoints, JSON-RPC methods, and integration with standard Ethereum development stacks.
• Cross-Chain Modules: Enables interoperability, such as with bridge protocols or as part of a multi-chain architecture (2506.19730, 2504.15449).

Variations in consensus, state management, and protocol extensions yield diverse performance profiles, compatibility edges, and security implications.

2. Scalability, Transaction Costs, and State Growth

Scalability and cost efficiency are key drivers for EVM-compatible chain differentiation. Approaches vary from offloading consensus to external networks to deep architectural optimizations:

• Separation of Execution and Consensus: Systems like 1DLT decouple EVM execution from consensus by using Consensus-as-a-Service (CaaS), outsourcing transaction finality to high-throughput DLTs (e.g., Hedera, Algorand), thereby increasing TPS to >1000 and reducing average finality to under 5 seconds, with lower total costs:

$$\text{Cost}_{\text{total}} = \text{cost}_{\text{transaction}} + \text{fee}_{\text{gas}} + \text{fee}_{\text{DLT}}$$

(2208.07665)

• Parallelization and Asynchrony: Sei Giga employs a multi-proposer Autobahn consensus with asynchronous block execution, decoupling transaction ordering from execution and yielding throughput exceeding 5 gigagas/sec and finality under 400 ms (2505.14914).
• Rollups and Data Compression: Rollups batch and compress transactions (via provable computation in ZK or optimistic models), allowing significant fee reduction during transaction surges, with ZK-rollups (e.g., ZKsync Era) showing sharper fee drops compared to optimistic rollups (e.g., Arbitrum), especially during mass inscription/meme coin minting events (2405.15288).
• State Storage Rent: Novel rent mechanisms aim to address uncontrolled state growth, shifting the burden from accounts to transaction senders and collecting node-level rent on trie access:

$$\text{Rent}_{\text{node}} = R \times s \times (t_{\text{current}} - t_{\text{last}})$$

where $R$ is rate, $s$ is node size, and $t_{\text{last}}$ is last rent update (2210.13670).

This diversity of approaches reflects the continuous search for improved scalability, efficiency, and economic sustainability within EVM-compatible networks.

3. Interoperability and Cross-Chain Protocols

The proliferation of EVM-compatible chains has led to increasing emphasis on cross-chain asset and logic transfers, raising both technical and economic challenges:

• Bridgeless Protocol: Implements a formal validator-driven protocol for moving assets across chains, with explicit support for EVM-compatible networks. Bridgeless achieves liveness and safety through threshold signatures, reliable broadcasts, and embedded consensus phases (2506.19730). Critical security guarantees are mathematically formalized:

$$\forall\, \text{deposit} \implies \exists\, r: \text{Delay(withdrawal)} \leq r,\qquad \text{withdrawal}_{\text{tx}} \in \text{TargetChain} \implies \exists\, \text{deposit}_{\text{tx}} \in \text{SourceChain}$$

• Cross-Chain Smart Contract Execution: IntegrateX provides an efficient solution to the problem of ensuring atomic and high-performance cross-chain smart contract executions. It does so via a two-phase commit protocol that integrates all cross-chain logic within a single blockchain execution, separates logic and state contracts, and achieves up to 61.2% latency reduction (2502.12820).
• Address and Transaction Traceability: The uniform address space and transaction structure across EVM chains allows for matching and tracing of cross-chain movements—for example, with heuristic algorithms that relate deposits and withdrawals between Ethereum and Polygon using criteria such as address, token identity, value, and timing (2504.15449).

These protocols and methodologies provide a robust framework for interoperability, but also surface security and design trade-offs around validator sets, confirmation windows, and centralization.

4. Security, Code Reuse, and Developer Practices

While EVM compatibility fosters code portability, empirical research demonstrates that literal reuse of Ethereum contracts on other EVM-compatible chains often results in subtle inconsistencies—termed "EVM-Inequivalent Code Smells" (2504.07589). Six types of code smells have been identified: | Code Smell Abbreviation | Description | |-------------------------|----------------------------------| | CCRA | Cross-Chain Replay Attack | | TDT | Time Discrepancy Trap | | FGR | Fixed Gas Reentrancy | | BHM | Block Height Misalignment | | PCA | Phishing Contract Address | | GLI | Gas Limit Imbalance |

These arise due to differences in parameters like Chain ID, gas mechanisms, block timing, and address derivation. Automated detection tools (e.g., EquivGuard) integrate static taint analysis and symbolic execution to measure the prevalence of these issues—seen in 17.70% of surveyed contracts—and achieve high precision/recall in detecting such inconsistencies.

Developers are strongly urged to avoid naïve code portability and instead test, analyze, and dynamically parameterize contracts before redeployment to ensure behavioral equivalence and security.

5. Economic Design: Fees, Stablecoins, and Network Effects

The economic layer on EVM-compatible chains increasingly experiments with improved fee structures and multi-asset systems:

• Stablecoin-Native Fee Models: MStableChain introduces native support for multiple stablecoins as transaction fee units, combined with oracle-based dynamic gas adjustment to maintain fee stability. A multi-currency account state and multi-type RPC mechanism enables full EVM compatibility with stable fee pricing, robust governance, and demonstrated fee volatility reduction to 0.4% versus order-of-magnitude variations on standard Ethereum (2410.22100).
• Strategic Compatibility Decisions: The "To EVM or Not to EVM" analysis (2208.10269) shows, from a game-theoretic perspective, that EVM-compatible chains benefit from network effects and developer portability, leading to equilibrium payoffs that strongly favor joining the dominant chain. Further, the cost of adoption subsidies is lower for compatible chains, highlighting the importance of compatibility for ecosystem growth and transactional liquidity.
• Privacy Enhancements: The use of ZK-friendly hash functions and SNARKs, optimized for EVM environments, enables batch-processing privacy-preserving protocols with significant (up to 73%) cost reduction on EVM chains (2409.01976).

6. Operational Monitoring, State Management, and Network Health

Stream-based monitoring of EVM-compatible networks leverages real-time RPC data collection, Kafka-based message brokering, and complex event processing pipelines to inform both governance and DApp deployment (2505.16095). With the rapid expansion of rollup networks—each with different interpretations of gas limits and fee structures—such monitoring becomes essential for cross-network app optimization, fee minimization, and responsive protocol governance. Incorporation of data normalization operators accommodates metric disparities across different EVM-based rollups (e.g., Arbitrum, Linea).

Additionally, sustainable state growth remains a central concern. Innovations in per-node, transaction-triggered state rent (2210.13670) and asynchronous state agreement architectures (2505.14914) aim to improve decentralization, network responsiveness, and client performance.

7. Future Directions and Open Challenges

The evolution of EVM-compatible chains is marked by parallel efforts to scale execution (via parallelization, rollups, or consensus innovation), ensure safe cross-chain operations (formally analyzed bridge protocols, traceability), manage state bloat (storage rent models), and maintain economic efficiency (stablecoin-native fees, dynamic pricing).

Key future research directions include:

• Extending security analysis and interoperability protocols to non-EVM (e.g., Bitcoin) and heterogeneous ecosystems (2506.19730).
• Improving the detection and mitigation of behavioral inconsistencies in contract reuse (2504.07589).
• Further automating real-time operational monitoring and normalization across cross-chain and cross-rollup environments (2505.16095).
• Refining atomic cross-chain execution strategies for broad, composable dApp architectures (2502.12820).

As EVM-compatible chains proliferate and diversify, sustaining compatibility, security, interoperability, and operational excellence remains a convergent challenge for both researchers and practitioners.