Why the EVM is a Legacy System in a Modular World

The EVM is a monolith in a modular world. Its architecture bundles execution, settlement, and data availability, creating a single point of failure and congestion. This design prevents the specialization seen in rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism, which must inherit its constraints.

EVM compatibility is a tax on performance. Chains like Solana and Fuel achieve higher throughput by abandoning the EVM's global state model and synchronous execution. The EVM's gas metering and storage model imposes overhead that modular execution layers must inefficiently emulate.

Innovation happens off-chain. The most significant scaling and UX advances, like intent-based architectures (UniswapX, CowSwap) and parallel execution (Sui, Aptos), bypass the EVM core. The ecosystem is building around the EVM, not because of it.

Evidence: Ethereum L1 processes ~15 TPS. Modular rollup stacks like Arbitrum Nitro and zkSync Era demonstrate that moving execution off the EVM is the only path to scaling, handling orders of magnitude more transactions by design.

EVM is a legacy system. Its design bundles execution, consensus, data availability, and settlement into a single layer, creating inherent scalability limits. This monolithic model forces all applications to compete for the same constrained resources, a fundamental flaw in a world requiring specialized performance.

Modularity demands specialization. Modern stacks like Celestia for data availability, EigenLayer for restaking, and Arbitrum for execution prove that optimal performance requires dedicated layers. The EVM's one-size-fits-all virtual machine cannot match the efficiency of purpose-built environments like Solana's Sealevel or Fuel's UTXO model.

The bottleneck is the instruction set. The EVM's 256-bit word size and stack-based architecture are computationally inefficient for high-frequency trading or complex game logic. Applications needing speed or novel state models are forced into L2s, which then incur bridging latency and costs to interoperate with the mainnet.

Evidence: The migration of major DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Aave to L2 rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism is a market verdict. These platforms handle orders of magnitude more transactions by decoupling execution from Ethereum's monolithic core, proving the demand for specialized environments the base EVM cannot provide.

The EVM is a monolith by design, forcing consensus, execution, and data availability into a single, rigid layer. This architecture creates a scalability bottleneck where every node must redundantly process every transaction, a model that directly contradicts the specialization principle of modular blockchains like Celestia or EigenDA.

Consensus dictates execution speed because the EVM's state transition function is the core of its consensus mechanism. This coupling makes parallel execution and optimistic state transitions impossible without a hard fork, unlike the native capabilities of Solana or the modular execution layers on Arbitrum Nitro.

EVM bytecode is inefficient for modern hardware. Its 256-bit word size and stack-based architecture waste compute cycles and memory, creating a performance tax that newer VMs like SVM (Solana) or Fuel's FuelVM avoid through register-based designs and native parallelization.

Evidence: The gas cost for a simple ETH transfer on Ethereum is ~21,000 gas. On a modular execution layer like Arbitrum, the same operation costs ~0.21 gas (L2 gas), demonstrating the order-of-magnitude efficiency unlocked by decoupling execution from base-layer consensus.

EVM is a consensus bottleneck. Its synchronous execution model forces all nodes to redundantly compute every transaction, a design antithetical to parallel processing and specialized execution layers like Fuel or Eclipse.

Developer lock-in is a tax. Solidity and the EVM bytecode standardize on the lowest common denominator, forcing developers to ignore superior VMs like Move or SVM that offer native asset safety and parallel execution.

The liquidity argument is flawed. Interoperability protocols like LayerZero and Axelar abstract chain boundaries, while intents-based systems like UniswapX and Across route liquidity optimally, making native EVM liquidity less decisive.

Evidence: The migration of major dApps like Aave and Uniswap to non-EVM L2s (e.g., Starknet) demonstrates that liquidity follows the best execution environment, not the other way around.