VM Matters: A Comparison of WASM VMs and EVMs in the Performance of Blockchain Smart Contracts
Authors: 
Yixuan Zhang, Shuyu Zheng, Haoyu Wang, Lei Wu, Gang Huang, 
Xuanzhe LiuAuthors Info & Claims
Yixuan Zhang, Shuyu Zheng, Haoyu Wang, Lei Wu, Gang Huang, Xuanzhe LiuAuthors Info & ClaimsArticle No.: 5, Pages 1 - 24
Abstract
Beyond an emerging popular web applications runtime supported in almost all commodity browsers, WebAssembly (WASM) is further regarded to be the next-generation execution environment for blockchain-based applications. Indeed, many popular blockchain platforms such as EOSIO and NEAR have adopted WASM-based execution engines. Most recently, WASM has been favored by Ethereum, the largest smart contract platform, to replace the state-of-the-art EVM. However, whether and how well current WASM outperforms EVM on blockchain clients is still unknown. This article conducts the first measurement study to understand the performance on WASM VMs and EVM for executing smart contracts for blockchain-based applications. To our surprise, the current WASM VM does not provide expected satisfactory performance. The overhead introduced by WASM is really non-trivial. Our results shed the light on challenges when deploying WASM in practice, and provide insightful implications for improvement space.
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Index Terms
- VM Matters: A Comparison of WASM VMs and EVMs in the Performance of Blockchain Smart Contracts
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Publication History
Published: 18 March 2024
Online AM: 27 January 2024
Accepted: 03 January 2024
Revised: 07 August 2023
Received: 28 January 2023
Published in TOMPECS Volume 9, Issue 2
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