EVM Design Choices Locked In Years Ago

The EVM is single-threaded. Every transaction executes sequentially on a single CPU core, a design that prevents parallel execution and caps throughput regardless of node hardware. This is why Solana's Sealevel runtime and Sui's Move-based parallel execution are architectural responses to this fundamental bottleneck.

Storage is astronomically expensive. The 20k gas per 256-bit word cost makes on-chain data storage prohibitive, forcing L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism to use off-chain data availability layers. This cost structure birthed the entire rollup-centric roadmap and protocols like Celestia and EigenDA.

256-bit words dominate gas. Operations on Ethereum's native 256-bit integers are inefficient on modern 64-bit hardware, consuming extra gas for simple math. This design favors cryptographic operations but penalizes complex financial logic, a trade-off that shapes DeFi contract design to this day.

Evidence: The EVM's gas schedule has remained largely unchanged since 2015. Major upgrades like EIP-1559 tweaked the fee market but did not alter these core computational costs, proving their immutability.

The EVM is a state machine designed for a single-threaded world. Its synchronous execution and global state model create a hard throughput ceiling that scaling solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism must work around, not fix.

Account abstraction is a retrofit, not a native feature. The externally owned account (EOA) model forces protocols like Safe and ERC-4337 to build complex infrastructure for features Solana and Sui provide at the base layer.

Intent-based architectures are impossible under strict EVM semantics. Systems like UniswapX and Across require off-chain solvers because the EVM cannot natively express or settle user intents, adding latency and fragmentation.

Evidence: The gas cost of a simple ETH transfer has not meaningfully decreased. Layer 2s reduce fees by batching, but the underlying computation cost per opcode remains bound by the EVM's inefficient 256-bit architecture.

The 256-bit word size is the EVM's atomic unit, dictating gas costs for storage and computation. This choice optimized for cryptographic operations but makes native 64-bit efficiency impossible, forcing modern VMs like Solana's Sealevel or Fuel's UTXO model to rebuild from scratch for performance.

Synchronous execution with global state mandates that all transactions serially modify a single world state. This creates a scalability ceiling that parallel EVMs like Monad or Neon EVM must architect complex workarounds for, unlike inherently parallel systems like Aptos Move.

The gas metering model directly ties opcode costs to a single-threaded execution model. This makes dynamic gas pricing and execution parallelization a fundamental rewrite, a challenge projects like Arbitrum Stylus confront when integrating non-EVM languages.

Evidence: The EVM's design forces L2s to spend ~20% of their gas on proof costs (ZK) or fraud proof overhead (Optimistic), a tax that native parallel chains like Sui avoid entirely.

EVM's lock-in is absolute. The 2015 design choices for gas accounting and 256-bit words created a de facto standard for tooling and developer onboarding. This birthed the Ethereum Virtual Machine ecosystem, where every wallet, indexer, and auditor is optimized for its quirks.

The moat is developer liquidity. A protocol launching on a non-EVM chain like Solana or Fuel must rebuild its entire stack from scratch. This switching cost protects incumbents like Arbitrum and Polygon, which inherit the EVM's tooling and talent pool.

The defense has structural cracks. EVM's synchronous execution model and global state are bottlenecks for scaling. Competitors like Monad and Sei exploit this by designing parallel execution from first principles, offering an order-of-magnitude performance leap.

Evidence: Over 90% of all smart contract value and developer activity remains on EVM-compatible chains. However, Solana's throughput of 5,000 TPS undercuts EVM L2s, proving the network effect's vulnerability to superior architecture.

EVM's design is ossified. Its 256-bit architecture, single-threaded execution, and global state model are technical debt. Newer VMs like Solana's Sealevel or Fuel's UTXO model demonstrate superior efficiency, but the network effect of Solidity and existing tooling makes a clean-slate replacement impossible.

Innovation migrates to L2s. The core protocol is static, so progress happens in execution environments like Arbitrum Stylus or zkSync's LLVM compiler. These layers introduce new VMs and languages while maintaining bytecode-level EVM compatibility, a mandatory concession to the installed base.

The cost is fragmentation. Every L2 becomes a bespoke execution silo with its own proving system and data availability solution. This creates the interoperability nightmare that protocols like LayerZero and Axelar attempt, often unsuccessfully, to solve. The modular blockchain thesis is a direct consequence of EVM's immutability.