On October 24, venture capital firms such as a16z crypto and Greylock participated in a $13.4 million seed round for cryptocurrency startup smlXL, an on-chain data platform for developers around EVM.
Recently, whether it is the sharp increase in Bitcoin prices or the frequent emergence of new hot spots in the Ordinals ecosystem, the discussion and attention around Bitcoin has been very lively. In contrast, the discussion on the Ethereum ecosystem is relatively quiet. Although ETH and related contract tokens have increased, it can be seen more as taking advantage of the Bitcoin surge and the excitement of the community.
The narrative of the “world computer” certainly has room for development. In addition to the prosperous ecosystem brought about by various smart contracts, the EVM that provides an environment for the generation of contracts also has recent developments worth understanding.
What products does smlXL have? Why is it favored by a16z? BlockBeats has sorted out this based on relevant information.
smlXL: Making blockchain more transparent, accessible and useful
smlXL has been relatively low-key since its establishment. The team has only 16 people. Its founder Dor Levi was once the vice president of Lyft, the second largest ride-sharing company in the United States after Uber. Team member Xiang was once the technical director of opensea.
In a blog, Dor Levi said that he was attracted by the "public computer" feature of blockchain. With the mission of "making blockchain more transparent, accessible and useful", he focused on serving smart contract developers and launched smlXL in 2021.
smlXL builds proprietary technology to rigorously analyze EVM bytecode and contracts using the determinism and transparency of blockchain. It combines static and dynamic analysis, symbolic execution, instrumentation, and simulation capabilities built specifically for blockchain to provide developers with a complete and rich understanding of accounts, contracts, and their rich relationships.
smlXL's current products include evm.codes and evm.storage. The former is an interactive guide to EVM opcodes launched last year, and has become one of the preferred resources for every EVM developer; evm.storage enables developers to decode and track each Solidity contract in real time, and is the team's attempt to make EVM and its data more transparent from a storage perspective.
Electric Capital estimated in a report that in June 2023, the number of developers active per month on evm.codes and evm.storage was close to 20,000.
evm.codes
Last year, smlXL launched evm.codes , an interactive guide to the EVM opcodes for developers, which has become one of the go-to resources for every EVM developer.
In evm.codes, there is a basic introduction to EVM and smart contracts, as well as detailed development instructions, to help developers get started with smart contract development on Ethereum.
evm.storage
smlXL announced the launch of evm.storage in June, a blockchain explorer designed to help developers gain insight into the storage state of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.
With evm.storage, developers can decode and track each Solidity contract in real time.
On October 25, the smlXL team announced a major improvement to evm.storage, expanding coverage to unverified Solidity contracts. Using the storage layout generated by the contract bytecode to represent the contract can improve the visibility of unverified contracts on evm.storage. This update will open source the code of the storage layout extractor. In addition, the team will also launch a transaction page.
iEVM
Developers prioritize security, cost, and composability; however, these sometimes conflict with how they want to consume, analyze, and use these contracts in their products. iEVM introduces a paradigm where developers can do complex computations off-chain, delivering applications faster and at a lower cost.
In April 2022, the team launched iEVM, a proprietary EVM client implementation designed to simulate and instrument blockchains. The team said that iEVM can run in a distributed manner on multiple machines, inject custom instrumentation contracts with special access rights to other contracts and states, and run custom transactions in a sandbox environment. Developers can extract/emit data from iEVM and its computing products, transform data, and load it into data storage, services, and applications.
With the iEVM and the platform, developers can build services that maintain critical state on the chain, interact with contracts, but cheaply perform related calculations in the iEVM simulation with enhanced capabilities. This can be understood as low-cost off-chain logging.
In the past year alone, there were 880 million logs on Ethereum, costing about $75 million, or 4.4% of total gas. Developers reduce logging to reduce costs, but this reduces observability. With infrastructure like iEVM, developers can do unlimited logging at a fraction of the off-chain cost.
progress
On October 24, smlXL announced the completion of a $3.4 million seed round of financing, with participation from a16z crypto and Greylock. The funds will be used for the development of EVM.code and evm.storage.
According to the team, the future roadmap includes: expanding the coverage of evm.storage to all major blockchain entities (contracts, accounts, transactions, and blocks) of the main EVM chain and testnet; enabling users to interact with contracts, simulate transactions, and explore simulation traces; and launching an introduction to the blockchain natural language interface, enabling users to more easily explore, interact, and participate in the blockchain.
In addition, new products based on the unique capabilities of the iEVM, streaming data platform, and program analysis tools will continue to be introduced in the future.
