WebAssembly for Blockchain: LIVE at Ready Layer One

Introduction and Background

The participants introduce themselves and their projects.

Introductions

• Ethan Fry is the founder of Cosm Wasm project, which installs a wasm smart contract engine inside the Cosmos SDK.

• Max from NEAR Particle leads the middleware team and has been following closely with Parity, Golem, and Cosmos. They launched phase 0 of mainnet recently.

• Sergey works at Parity on integrating WASM execution engines into Ethereum and Substrate modules for smart contracts.

• Jacob is one of the developers and R&D researchers at Golem. He co-authored G-WASM platform that deals with WebAssembly.

Project Discussion

The participants discuss various topics related to their projects.

Topics Discussed

• Max discusses how they drew inspiration from Cosmos design while developing NEAR Particle's middleware. They also looked at parity and substrate for inspiration.

• Sergey talks about his work on integrating WASM execution engines into Ethereum and Substrate modules for smart contracts.

• Jacob discusses his work on G-WASM platform that deals with WebAssembly. He also talks about his contributions to mobile assembly community group spec.

Conclusion

The participants wrap up their discussion.

Wrap Up

The discussion was free-flowing, covering various topics related to their respective projects.

Building Your Own Virtual Machine

In this section, the speakers discuss the advantages and disadvantages of building your own virtual machine (VM) versus using an existing one.

Advantages of Using an Existing VM

• Using a general-purpose VM like WebAssembly (WASM) or Java Virtual Machine (JVM) has many advantages due to the extensive tooling and community support available.

• Building your own VM is only necessary if it's a core value proposition. Otherwise, it's not worth the effort since there is so much to gain from using existing tools.

• It's impossible to replicate the amount of tooling that comes with using an existing language and VM, making it difficult to justify building your own.

Specialization in Web Assembly

• For encoding logical blockchain data in Substrate, WASM is perfect because it provides high performance and low-level access for implementing different abstractions.

• However, for contracts, there are more peculiarities involved in communication between packages that own state and funds. This makes it harder to specialize in this area without facing problems such as auditing issues.

Opportunities for Specialization

• There may be opportunities for specialization in the future once we have more knowledge about what works best for new systems/models.

• Currently, big standards like WASM have backing from large companies and are hard to compete with due to their extensive tooling and community support.

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