Original author: Lukasinho, GCR research team
Original compilation: Luffy, Foresight News
Transaction parallel execution is a promising blockchain scaling technology that is necessary to achieve widespread blockchain adoption without sacrificing user experience and decentralized liquidity. Solana and its virtual machine (SVM) pioneered the approach of parallel execution rather than purely sequential execution. This approach is more complex relative to the dominant Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Recently, a number of promising projects have attempted to overcome this barrier, offering developers the possibility to create applications with Solanas performance within the familiar EVM environment.
In this article, we will look at Monad, Sei V2, Neon EVM, and Eclipse, which are all potential projects dedicated to such parallel EVM solutions. We’ll take a deep dive into how these networks are designed, their pros and cons, and discuss the future development of these parallel blockchains.
The future of parallel EVM
There is no doubt that Ethereum is the most widely used smart contract blockchain and has the strongest community and ecosystem. However, while Ethereum is working tirelessly to achieve scalability, the transition from sharding to rollup makes scalability of Ethereum as a base layer challenging. While a Rollup-centric approach can be a scalability solution, it is not without its drawbacks. Liquidity fragmentation and poor user experience due to interacting with many different blockchains will be a huge obstacle to overcome.
What if Ethereum as we know it reached 10,000 TPS or higher in another parallel universe? Monad, Sei, Neon, and Eclipse are fully EVM-compatible blockchains that leverage parallel execution for scalability.
Source: twitter.com/SeiNetwork
Monad
Monad is a high-performance EVM blockchain designed to significantly enhance scalability and transaction speed through parallel execution. It is optimized in four key areas to make it a high-performance blockchain.
Monad BFT
Monad BFT is a consensus protocol used by the Monad blockchain to achieve transaction ordering consistency. It allows many nodes in the network to safely agree on the order of transactions, even if some nodes are dishonest or offline. Monad BFT operates as a leader-based two-phase commit, collecting threshold signatures from 2 f + 1 validators, which are aggregated into a single signature using pairing-based cryptography. This increases efficiency, scalability, and reduces storage space compared to individual signatures.
Deferred execution
Monads separate consensus and execution to improve performance. The consensus layer involves nodes agreeing on the order of transactions but not executing them. The execution layer consists of nodes that independently execute ordered transactions to update state. By separating consensus and execution, Monad enables faster consensus through larger transaction packaging. A single slot implementation of 1 second (single slot finality), the execution delay is less than 1 second, ensuring consistency while achieving high transaction throughput on a single shard. The architecture decouples consensus and execution to optimize transaction ordering and processing.
Parallel execution
Monads allow transactions to be executed in parallel within a block to improve efficiency. It uses the Optimistic method to start executing a new transaction before the execution of the previous step is completed. To cope with incorrect results, Monad tracks input/output and re-executes inconsistent transactions. Static code parsers can predict dependencies, avoid ineffective parallelism, and revert to simple mode in times of uncertainty. This parallel execution increases throughput while reducing the likelihood of transaction failure.
Monad DB
Monads perform asynchronous I/O (input/output operations) to enable parallel transaction execution, unlike traditional systems that must wait for I/O results before processing the next transaction. Asynchronous I/O allows the CPU to process other transactions without waiting for specific I/O results. Monad DB leverages advanced Linux kernel features to enable efficient asynchronous disk operations, eliminating the limitations of synchronous I/O. Traditional Ethereum databases lack asynchronous I/O support, but Monad DB is built to take full advantage of it. This asynchronous approach greatly improves the efficiency of transaction processing while maintaining Ethereum compatibility.
Sei
Sei V2 is a large-scale upgrade to the Sei network and aims to be the first fully parallel EVM. This upgrade will provide Sei with the following features:
Backwards compatible with EVM smart contracts
Developers can port already-audited smart contracts on other EVM-compatible chains directly to Sei without changing any code. The Sei node will import Geth (the Go implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine), Geth will be used to process EVM transactions, and any resulting updates (including state updates or calls to non-EVM related contracts) will be created by Sei for the EVM. Special interface. This is an important upgrade as it simplifies the process of moving existing smart contracts from other blockchains such as Ethereum to Sei.
Optimistic parallelization
Like Monads, Sei V2 will use Optimistic parallelization. This allows the blockchain to execute transactions simultaneously without requiring developers to define any dependencies. When a conflict occurs, the blockchain keeps track of the portion of storage touched by each transaction and reruns those transactions in order. This process will continue recursively until all unresolved conflicts are resolved.
Sei DB
Sei DB is a new two-component data structure designed to optimize storage and prevent blockchain bloat. It separates state storage and state submission, changing the traditional single IAVL tree design. Compared with a single tree, this dual structure reduces latency and disk usage while improving multi-threaded read and write performance.
Neon EVM
Neon EVM is a fully EVM-compatible solution built on the Solana blockchain. It will run as a smart contract within Solana, allowing developers to deploy Ethereum DApps without any reconfiguration.
Neon EVM enables Solidity and Vyper-based DApps to take advantage of Solana’s network advantages: low fees, high transaction speeds, and parallel transaction execution capabilities.
This means creating Solana-compatible contracts using the Ethereum ecosystem tools that developers are familiar with. Neon EVM makes key Ethereum DApp tools compatible with Solana, including Vyper, Solidity, and MetaMask. The solution allows any Ethereum application to run on Solana with minimal reconfiguration, including Uniswap, SushiSwap, 0x and MakerDAO.
Eclipse
Eclipse is the next generation Optimistic Layer 2 solution on Ethereum, powered by the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). By integrating Ethereums settlement capabilities with SVMs high-performance and parallel execution, the Eclipse mainnet provides a combination of speed, scalability, and security. It uses Ethereum for settlement and ETH as Gas tokens, ensuring compatibility and security while improving transaction throughput.
Eclipse aims to solve Ethereums scalability challenges, leveraging Celestia for data availability and RISC Zero for zero-knowledge proofs, aiming to achieve greater transaction capacity without sacrificing security and decentralization. In other words, the Eclipse team will continue to pay close attention to Ethereums EIP-4844 upgrade and consider migrating to Ethereums DA in the future, which will further improve the security of Eclipse.
SVM and its Sealevel runtime support parallel transaction execution. As with Sei V2 and Monads, transactions that do not involve overlapping states can be executed in parallel rather than sequentially.
Source: Eclipse.builders
For EVM compatibility, Eclipse will integrate Neon EVM. This will bring full EVM compatibility (including Ethereum bytecode and Ethereum JSON-RPC) to the Eclipse mainnet. Since each Neon EVM instance has its own local fee market, applications only need to deploy their own contracts to gain all the benefits of application chains without disrupting user experience, security, or liquidity. In this way, in addition to being a Layer 2 network, Eclipse is intended to be the infrastructure layer for a thriving Layer 3 ecosystem. Trendsetting Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum and Base have also recently begun developing Layer 3. In addition, the Solang compiler can compile Solidity smart contract code into SVM bytecode. This allows developers to deploy Solidity contracts on Eclipse without having to use the Neon EVM to launch their own Layer 3.
Compare
Of the two independent parallel EVM chains, Monad seems to receive more attention. Despite having a much smaller number of followers compared to Sei, their posts generated more interactions, and three times as many people were present in a recent Twitter Space than in a Space hosted by Sei. This shows that Monad has a more welcoming and active community. The Ethereum community in particular seems very excited about its upcoming product, which will put Monad in a good position to capture early hype and adoption.
Although Seis performance metrics appear to be higher than Monads and they were launched first, Sei has received less attention. Sei has seen a massive backlash since announcing the parallelized EVM, but the fact that it had been launched earlier as a CosmWASM chain and its tokens have been in circulation for a while has made it lose its novelty. Seis narrative appears to be weaker than Monads, and due to its cosmic background, Ethereum community members dont view it as much of an Ethereum ecosystem project.
Due to Solanas upcoming Firedancer client, Neon EVM and Eclipse will provide superior performance over Monad and Sei, which illustrates the performance shortcomings EVM faces relative to SVM, even if it also implements parallelization. Despite this performance advantage and launching mainnet earlier than other projects, Neon still struggled to find its place in the market. Early adoption rates for Neon have been very disappointing, to say the least. This may be because Neon doesnt really have a target audience. The Ethereum community is highly skeptical of Solana due to its unreliability, lack of security, and lack of decentralization. Therefore, they are not interested in launching applications on Solana. On the other hand, the Solana community is happy using SVM and has no interest in switching to EVM, which leaves Neon EVM in an awkward position where no one is really interested.
Will Eclipse face the same fate? As Ethereum Layer 2, it leverages the security, decentralization, and reliability of Ethereum. But due to running the Solana virtual machine at the base layer, it may still face skepticism from the Ethereum community. Unifying the best of Ethereum and Solana, while also neatly incorporating the trend of modular blockchain design and supporting DApp-specific Layer 3 Rollup, Eclipse seems to be tapping into all the hot trends and narratives in Web3 currently. From its design, technology, and performance, Eclipse should be perfectly positioned to create a strong narrative around its release. Eclipse looks promising so far, it is maintaining strong momentum and is hiring more marketing professionals.
future outlook
Competition in the Web3 space is fierce, with many Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions vying for attention. Success isnt just about having the most advanced technology, its equally important to create a compelling story, build a strong community, and attract developers. This puts blockchains that excel at the latter in a strong position.
Monads are well positioned in the upcoming parallel EVM narrative. Despite slightly lower performance than Sei, Monad has received the most hype and attention. However, the cryptocurrency story is quickly disappearing. Monad will have to capitalize on this short-term hype to bootstrap their ecosystem.
In addition to competing with each other, these competitors must also compete with Ethereum, Layer 2, and second-generation blockchains such as Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon. These adversaries have all had more time to develop their communities and ecosystems. The appeal, innovative technology and impressive performance of shiny new products will likely turn heads when Monad, Sei and Eclipse are launched. Long-term success will depend on their ability to capitalize on this attention and allow users and developers to continue to develop their own thriving ecosystems and communities.
