Replies: 3 comments 6 replies
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I am glad to hear about the roadmap for integrating EVM v1 into Frontier. This has been a concern of mine for some time, as maintaining two separate implementations has been contributing to technical debt. My main concern moving forward is ensuring that all fixes and features are properly ported from the v0.x to the master branch. (We did this well for the Cancun changes, but we still need to port Pectra EIP's and other fixes to the master branch). One aspect I am particularly interested about EVM v1 is that we will finally be able to utilize the vector tests from ethereum/tests, which will greatly improve test coverage and consistency. Additionally, I do like to raise a question: have we explored the possibility of using |
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I read the discussion on the Polkadot forum yesterday and was excited to see Wei returning to Frontier. As an old member/user of Frontier, we (Darwinia parachain) are one of the projects using Frontier as Darwinia chain's base layer. However, we made some changes to our development direction at the start of this year. We now only keep the most critical pallets on the Darwinia chain and maintain them over time. Our team currently focuses more effort on our new project at the application layer, such as https://github.com/ringecosystem/degov that I am working on. This means I won't be able to contribute to Frontier as much as I did before, but I will still keep an eye on it and support it in any way I can. |
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Interesting approach. Glad to see a roadmap for frontier. |
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Project status
After year long disagreement with Parity over the direction of Ethereum-compatibility roadmap for Polkadot, we ended up parting ways. Ironically, in July 2025, Parity admitted itself that its current roadmap (the revive project) will not work as expected.
On 25 Jan 2024, "Parity Technologies Limited" and me signed an "Intellectual Property Rights Assignment Agreement" which assigned the IP of the whole Frontier project to me. In July 2025, I decided to found Bitarray GmbH which I'll move Frontier's ownership into, and I'll continue to develop Frontier always as before.
Regarding copyright, however, it is important to note that Frontier has not required CLA, and therefore the actual copyright is never owned by a single person or entity but by all contributors. So rest assured that even though the "ownership" can change, nothing practical will change.
At this moment, for Bitarray GmbH, we have secured sufficient cashflow for this year from another project. However, we don't yet have anything from the Polkadot ecosystem or for Frontier. In the next few months, we'll begin talking with ecosystem shareholders. We believe that the maintenance cost for Frontier is low to moderate (and we can justify the costs with support for parachain teams). Therefore we shouldn't expect big problems. However, it's important to note that the implementation of the roadmap may be subject to our funding status.
Rust EVM 1.0
In Frontier, we use the Rust EVM (originally called SputnikVM) project due to the usually extensive customization requirements for parachains. Gas metering must be adopted specifically for Substrate. Interop and precompile requirements. Special limitations on Polkadot, etc. Rust EVM has been the most suitable engine as it's designed from the very beginning with customization in mind (the first user of Rust EVM is actually not Ethereum mainnet!).
However, the codebase is indeed getting older and older as a 7 years old project. Certain customizations are currently not so smooth and they usually require changing the Rust EVM codebase. Our testing framework is also a bit "awkward" because it must be maintained as a separate repo (the old testing framework uses certain GPL components, but Rust EVM is Apache-2, so they must not be mixed).
Last year we started the work of Rust EVM 1.0 which aims to fix all the above problems:
We want to finish this work of Rust EVM 1.0 and fully integrate it into Frontier. The current remaining major work in Rust EVM is testing. Once that's finished we can then begin the integration in Frontier.
Optional PolkaVM support
The Revive project doesn't work, but that does not mean PolkaVM is bad. We know the majority of smart contracts are IO-bound. Still, a small number of them are compute-heavy. We therefore think that an optimal integration of PolkaVM is to simply use it as "pure precompiles". The idea is that smart contract developers continue to write all their business logic in EVM bytecode. At the time when they identified that certain parts are compute heavy, they rewrite only that specific part in Rust, compiled down to PolkaVM, and deploy it as pure precompiles. The business logic smart contract then invoke this PolkaVM precompile as a normal call.
As PoV and other storage IO costs are the major limitations in Polkadot (but not VM performance), we believe this may be the best way to get the best of both worlds (full compatibility + improved performance for compute-heavy contracts).
The PolkaVM support will be designed that it's completely optional. It'll be a separate crate/pallet that you can decide if you want to use it or not. If you don't like PolkaVM, then it's also perfectly fine to ignore it!
We already have basic implementation
pallet-evm-polkavmmerged into this repo. Our next step would be to clear up a few testing and benchmark issues and write more documentations.Open maintenance policy
Over the past years, we have added team members from parachain teams with maintenance rights in Frontier. We aim to further continue this policy and invite parachain teams in. The goal is to reduce the bottleneck of PR merging and avoid any possible "single-point-of-failure".
Request for input from the Polkadot ecosystem
If you are a Polkadot parachain or are developing tools for Polkadot, please leave a comment. We would love to hear your feedback and include what's important to you into our Frontier roadmap.
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