Web3bridge Students (cohort 11) Share What They’ve Learned: EVM Explained

hi my name is favor I'm here to discuss the evm so let's get started evm is short for ethereum virtual machine now this ethereum virtual machine is a core component of the ethereum blockchain now what does this mean the one of the key functionalities of ethereum is the ability to execute smart contracts the evm is solely responsible for that so what happens is it L right a smart contract in a high level language like solidity and this high level language smart contract gets compiled into evm by code now it gets compiled into evm bite code because this is the only language that evm actually understands once it's compiled into CM by code it gets deployed on the blockchain and broadcasted on on the network everybody has access every node participa in the network has access now these nodes run the bite code in attempt to execute the smart contract one thing I should point out here is the Network's ability to run the smart contract requires computational effort and that brings in the concept of gas running your contract on the network is not free so you need to pay a certain fee each step in your instruction from your Bice code has a certain charge to it that EV would cost you to run it now this is just to prevent Bad actors from hugging the resources of the ethereum network and also to make sure that the resources of eum network are is effectively distributed the programs on DVM are called smart contracts and they written in high level languages like solidity Viper and so forth so for the evm to be able to run this smart contract has to compile it and then it is compiled and into B codes these bite codes are made up of up codes which also stand for operation codes so up codes are basically they basically represent singular instructions and operations like addition subtraction push and know so codes are they Assembly Language and as own version of your codes which has standard operations like add subtract Etc and then it also has blockchain specific operations like balance address and blockers so each particular up code it has Associated gas fee and they play a big role in determining the total gas fee for your smart contract and they also have different categories such as we have the logical operations that the and not have the arithmetic up codes add so the the smart contract creation and interaction upods they create delegate and so understanding of uploads is really important in optimizing performance of your smart contract and optimizing your gas prices so the evm is the first level of ethereum stock uh we have five levels the ethereum stock is a is all the technologies that enable developers to build applications right on to of ethereal block ethereum blockchain right so there are five levels there's ethereum virtual machine smart contracts node software um client apis and then decentralized applications so essentially you really a developer has to understand the inner out of the ethereum virtu machine in order to produce good code so the major difference that separated ethereum from previously built blockchains like Bitcoin is that ethereum was conceptualized as a global distributed computer what that means is that anybody that's runs a node can run programs can execute programs on ethereum and it's the evm that enables this to happen right so the evm is also a teing complete machine what it means that can run any program and like my colleague said the gas is the mechanism that ensures that bad actors can't run um malicious or accidental code like infinite loops on DVM so once your once the amount of gas that you pay to run um a transaction is exhausted that transaction is stopped so the evm is also is distributed and it's virtual what that means also is that every for every transtion I sent to a Smart contract with the SM cont be executed an instance of the evm is created like a Sandbox in the node right and the evm has different different um different memory locations so to speak where it stores different types of um variables or data uh there's a program code ROM where and this part is imitable because smart contracts are generally imitable they can't be changed once they are deployed so the code of the smart contract is stored in the program code ROM that read only memory kind of like a hard drive on evm but not really because it's virtual then there's also the volatile memory which contains the stack and the memory location uh here is where the up codes are run the up codes are run on the 1,24 death stack as 256 bit W so a stack is a data structure where the last data object is executed first uh while the memory holds other pieces of information like updates logs like upate dogs and then there's also the persistent memory which stores the wall state or which saw the state of ethereum blockchain so every transaction every successful trans transaction changes the state of the ethereum of ethereum through a transition function so the in essence once a transaction is executed successfully it changes the state and then passes that on to the account storage which also holds other information about the account like the sender of the account the value that is passed by the account initiator to continue get more of these weekly updates I encourage you to like share and subscribe to all our social media platform thank you very much [Music]