The Decade of Change for Polkadot: How REVM Enables Ethereum Developers to "Seamlessly Migrate"?

This year is a big year for Polkadot — it's Parity's tenth anniversary, and the Polkadot Mainnet is also 5 years old. Over the past 5 years, Polkadot has evolved from theoretical exploration of a multi-chain architecture to a stable infrastructure that has been running for over 1800 days. But the real turning point is this year — the launch of REVM.

Why is REVM so important?

In simple terms: Polkadot has truly opened the doors for Ethereum developers for the first time.

Many people used to think that Polkadot was a “pure Rust, pure Substrate, and unrelated to EVM” chain. But this understanding is actually reversed. Polkadot's founder, Gavin Wood, is himself a core contributor to Ethereum—he is the author of the yellow paper, the designer of EVM, and the creator of Solidity. Later, the Parity Ethereum client developed by his team was once regarded as a “milestone for Ethereum's performance and security.”

So Polkadot has always carried the genes of EVM, but has been continuously working on larger architectural restructuring.

The Three Core Capabilities of REVM

1. 100% Compatible with the Solidity Ecosystem

• The contract does not need any changes, deploy directly
• Tools like Metamask, Hardhat, and Foundry are all supported.
• Leading protocols like Chainlink and Uniswap can be launched in seconds.

2. Performance far exceeds ordinary L2

• Rewritten in Rust, faster and more secure
• TPS and latency crush standard L2 solutions
• Especially suitable for DeFi and high-frequency trading scenarios

3. Deep integration with the Polkadot native system

• It's not a simple embedding, but a modular integration.
• Automatically connect on-chain governance and resource allocation
• Can run in parallel on the same chain with PolkaVM (native RISC-V virtual machine)

The Most Striking Design: “Dual Engine” Architecture

Polkadot 2.0's Polkadot Hub will support both PolkaVM and REVM virtual machines working simultaneously. The system will identify the execution environment based on the contract code header and schedule automatically.

What does this mean? Developers can choose the most suitable VM—for high performance and an existing Solidity codebase, use REVM; for extreme optimization and willingness to use a new language, use PolkaVM. The two ecosystems do not conflict, but rather complement each other.

Actual Impact on the Ecosystem

Reduce Migration Barriers: Millions of Ethereum engineers do not need to relearn Rust or change the code architecture; they can directly migrate their projects and run them.

Liquidity Aggregation: Ethereum's users, assets, and DeFi protocols are no longer isolated; Polkadot has become a true liquidity router—assets can flow freely between different chains.

Multi-Chain Application Paradigm: An application can simultaneously invoke code from Rollups, parallel chains, and different VM environments, achieving true cross-ecosystem combinations.

Conclusion

The launch of REVM marks the transition of multi-chain era infrastructure from competition to integration. It is no longer a zero-sum game of “choosing between chain A or chain B,” but a new idea of “how my application can span across all chains.”

For Solidity developers, this is not just a new deployment target, but also a ticket to enter the next generation of Web3 infrastructure.