Author: NingNing
In the post-Cancun upgrade era, Ethereum equivalence is no longer inherently correct.
The core of Ethereum equivalence is EVM compatibility. EVM compatibility is important not only because of EVM's simplicity and reliability and the completeness of development tools, but also because of EVM's developer community and the scale of deposited assets. EVM compatibility, obtaining developers, users, capital and other resources from the Ethereum ecosystem, is a shortcut for any chain/Rollup to quickly start and reach the PMF point.
But EVM is far from perfect. Its state data account mechanism, serial state data processing, and the VM characteristics of high-performance public chains are like comparing a 19th century ironclad ship to a 21st century destroyer.
After the Cancun upgrade, although the gas fee of the mainstream Rollup L2 dropped by two orders of magnitude, the expected explosion of the Ethereum L2 ecosystem did not come as expected. Instead, we welcomed the strong growth of high-performance public chain ecosystems such as Solana and Sui. This made some keen minds in the crypto industry begin to reflect on whether the universal Rollup L2 expansion solution, which aims to pursue the complete equivalence of Ethereum as the ultimate goal, is going in the wrong direction.
At present, the parallel expansion solution has three main disadvantages: EVM compatibility and consistency of the underlying mechanism make the Dapps in the Ethereum mainnet and Ethereum's general L2 ecosystem highly homogenized; the hub-and-spoke network structure of L1-L2-L3 also deprives Dapp developers of their sovereignty to a considerable extent; the 1+1+1+1+1+*+n linear scalability enhancement implemented by many L2s has a clumsy feeling of mechanical Lego stacking.
Therefore, we need both parallel expansion solutions and vertical expansion solutions. Perhaps, it is time to try to introduce the transaction parallel processing capabilities of high-performance public chain VMs into the Ethereum ecosystem to create some chaos and uncertainty. Recently, parallel EVM projects Monad, Movement, and Lumio (Pontem) have officially announced new rounds of financing led and participated by top crypto VCs.
Monad and Movement are well-known, so we will focus on the relatively low-key Lumio.
Lumio is a parallel EVM project developed by the Pontem team. It is positioned as Ethereum's altVM layer and is a VM abstraction protocol that supports multiple VMs such as Move, SVM, and WASM. This altVM layer supports out-of-the-box use, with minimal modifications, allowing teams in non-EVM ecosystems to "copy and paste" their code on Ethereum, and only need to maintain a single code base to minimize technical debt.
The Pontem team is a team with strong engineering capabilities. They have been deeply involved in the high-performance public chain ecosystem of the Move series since the Diem period. The team has now developed two mature products in the Aptos ecosystem: Liquidswap AMM and Pontem Wallet. These two products have an average of ~10,000 active addresses per day. Among them, Liquidswap has a cumulative Tx number of 8 million, 700,000 independent addresses, and a daily transaction volume of ~2 million US dollars.
To simply summarize the development history of Pontem, it is a process of wallet optimization and DEX, and DEX optimization and parallel EVM.
The Pontem team has extensive experience in application development, so when designing the Lumio architecture, they paid great attention to protecting the sovereignty of developers and providing them with the highest possible degree of freedom.
Lumio is designed to support any chain and any VM, helping developers break free from product supply chain shackles. VM-level modularity allows developers to choose their favorite VM (SVM, EVM, MoveVM) to deploy their favorite L2 and L1 on Lumio, such as Optimism and Solana, without compromising performance and interoperability.
Lumio achieves shared status and unified liquidity between Dapps on Lumio and mainstream L2 by integrating basic components such as OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbits' shared sorter and cross-chain bridge.
The shared state and unified liquidity between Lumio and L1 ecosystems such as Solana are achieved through cross-VM calls. Next, the Pontem team plans to support the shared state and unified liquidity between Lumio and other L1 ecosystems such as Bitcoin and Ton.
In order to achieve the above Lumio protocol design goals, Pontem reused a large number of OP Stack components, especially its RUST instance. Lumio's technology stack consists of the Magi node network developed by A16Z + Rust language Ethereum client Reth + OP Stack shared sequencer + altVM layer.
Such a technology stack design can not only fully utilize the high performance and security features of parallel EVMs such as SVM and MoveVM, but also maximize compatibility with EVM and UX (user interaction) consistency. The first mainnet iteration of Lumio, SuperLumio, can also be regarded as an OP super chain.
This makes Lumio naturally have a strongly linked graph relationship with other OP superchain projects, such as OP Mainnet, Base, Aevo, Worldcoin, Redstone, Mode and other Rollups, together forming a robust, prosperous and diverse L2 ecosystem.
To be honest, compared with Monad and Movement, Lumio's parallel EVM implementation is a "glue-like" engineering thinking solution, which has the advantages of fast availability, friendly developer learning curve, and stable and reliable. Although it does not have as high a concentration of new technology primitives as the first two solutions, it is still an excellent and novel Ethereum scalability L2 solution.
Finally, let me add some details about Pontem's latest round of financing: In January 2024, Pontem announced a $6 million round of financing, co-led by Lightspeed Faction (Faction) and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The financing also attracted participation from companies such as Pantera Capital, Aptos Foundation, Wintermute, Altonomy, Shima Capital and Kraken Ventures.
