In late 2019, the Aragon Project, decided to leave the Polkadot ecosystem due to the lack of a viable blockchain virtual machine at the time. After that, the Polkadot team added EVM support on the Substrate framework, enabling EVM blockchains in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Polkadot's founder, Dr. Gavin Wood, is one of the original architects of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Dr. Wood wrote the Ethereum yellow paper, which in mathematical terms, detailed how the EVM works.
Yet, the Polkadot ecosystem does NOT initially come with a Turing-complete virtual machine like the EVM. In fact, the Substrate framework, which underlies blockchains in the Polkadot ecosystem, is focused on Runtime Modules that build application functionalities and logic directly into the blockchain itself.
That makes sense in a cross-chain ecosystem, as each application can be served by its own blockchain instead of a smart contract.
Those are called application specific blockchains, and they can exchange results and assets via the Polkadot protocol.
However, deploying your own application specific blockchain is to manage a complex infrastructure of nodes, networks, operation systems, etc on your own.
That goes against the larger trend in IT today, which calls for less infrastructure complexities for developers -- and hence the rise of "serverless" and "microservices".
In a serverless world, developers just need to upload her code to the cloud, and users can access it and pay for the usage.
That vision is, in fact, very close to smart contracts on Ethereum blockchains. To support public submitted, unsecured application (smart contract) code, we need a Turing-complete, secure, and high performance virtual machine on blockchain nodes.
In late 2019, a large developer, the Aragon Project, decided to leave the Polkadot ecosystem due to the lack of a viable blockchain virtual machine at the time. After that, the Polkadot team added EVM support on the Substrate framework, enabling EVM blockchains in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Then in Feb 2020, the Web3 Foundation, announced that it is funding Second State to bring the next generation Ethereum virtual machine, known as the Ethereum flavored WebAssembly (Ewasm), into the Polkadot ecosystem.
Building on top of the very popular WebAssembly technology, Ewasm is a high performance and flexible virtual machine for the future of the Ethereum ecosystem, and hence will be used by the majority of blockchain application developers.
This project will bring Ethereum developers and applications into the Polkadot ecosystem, and expand the support for Ethereum protocol into Polkadot.
Second State is a leading developer of WebAssembly-based virtual machines for server-side applications. Ewasm is an extension of its generic Second State VM ( SSVM). The goal of the SSVM is to enable high performance, highly manageable, and secure microservice applications.
It works with existing blockchain and web service frameworks including Substrate, GETH, Tendermint etc on the blockchain side, as well as NodeJS, Python Django, RoR, PHP, Java etc on the web service side.
To learn more about how WebAssembly can help cloud and web services developers, check out this.
As software eats the world, infrastructure must be adapted to meet developer needs. Developers clearly want "serverless" and less infrastructure. WebAssembly and SSVM-based open source solutions are here to help!