DeveloperWeek Austin 2019

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the most widely used blockchain smart contract execution engine. It is core to the Ethereum protocol, which is now a $20 billion dollar ecosystem. From the developer point of view, the EVM enables cloud-native microservices on decentralized networks in the form of smart contract applications. The next generation of EVM is going to be based on the WebAssembly runtime, which supports mainstream programming languages and compile time / runtime optimizations. The next-gen EVM benefits the WebAssembly community, as it brings in many blockchain innovations, such as deterministic behavior, trustless consensus, digital currency infrastructure, formal verification, and zero knowledge computing. Subsequently, WebAssembly is positioned to become a popular execution engine for microservices in enterprise data centers, partially replacing the JVM, the JS VM, and containers like Docker.

In this talk, we will discuss the current state and future plans of the EVM and WebAssembly. We will give a live demo to show how you can deploy a decentralized microservice and a web frontend in 5 minutes. We will then discuss the future of the EVM and WebAssembly in enterprise IT.