Inscriptions, the latest digital collectible craze, have caused havoc on various blockchain networks, including Arbitrum, zkSync, and Avalanche. Branden Farmer, co-founder of Polygon, suggests that implementing parallelized Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVMs) could be the silver bullet to address the performance degradation and crashes triggered by the influx of inscriptions.
This novel form of digital collectible originated on the Bitcoin network following the Taproot upgrade in 2021. The upgrade enabled users to embed data into a transaction’s “witness” field, giving birth to images, tokens, and other collectibles on the Bitcoin blockchain. However, the excitement extended beyond Bitcoin, with inscription producers flooding Ethereum sidechains and layer-2s like Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Polygon.
The unique aspect of these inscriptions is their utilization of the “calldata” field in EVM-based networks, making them more cost-effective than traditional nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Unfortunately, this cost efficiency led to a surge in inscription transactions, resulting in high fees and instability across multiple blockchains. Notably, on December 15, Arbitrum experienced a 70-minute outage due to inscription spam.
Polygon’s Proposal: Parallelized EVMs To The Rescue
In an exclusive conversation, Polygon Co-founder proposed parallelized EVMs as a potential remedy for this issue. By allowing unrelated transactions to be processed simultaneously, parallelism could significantly enhance blockchain throughput, mitigating the impact of inscription spam.
Farmer explained, “In general, the EVM is executed sequentially, so every transaction in a block must be executed in order.” However, with a parallelized EVM, unrelated transactions can be processed concurrently, offering a more efficient way to handle various transactions.
Moreover, Farmer highlighted the “localized gas fees” concept, a feature not yet implemented on Polygon but part of their future goals. This approach aims to tailor gas fees to specific transaction types, ensuring that a surge in one transaction does not disproportionately affect others.
Polygon has already taken steps toward parallelization with the implementation of “Block-STM,” witnessing a 1.6x improvement in performance. Farmer emphasized that this approach, initially proposed by Solana developers, is gaining traction across multiple blockchains, including Aptos and Monad.
However, Farmer believes that combining parallelization with increased block space through layer-2 ecosystems, such as Polygon 2.0, will usher in a new era of improved performance and resilience against spam attacks.
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