Ethereum is almost universally credited for kickstarting the Web3 revolution after it brought to life the concept of smart contracts. However, some in the Web3 community, like Astar Network’s Sota Watanabe, believe the protocol cannot “build the innovative future of blockchain alone.” In addition, some critics point to the language obstacle which they argue makes the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) a less-than-ideal place to build.
Webassembly Smart Contracts ‘Will Accelerate the Adoption of Web3’
It is this and other limitations of the EVM that led to the creation of an alternative known as Webassembly (WASM). This alternative is said to be a virtual machine of choice for developers, engineers and academics that are frustrated with the EVM. According to Watanabe, for Web2 developers that want to migrate to Web3, WASM seems like a logical choice because it “supports a wide range of languages with native performance and high portability.”
To learn more about WASM, Bitcoin.com News reached out to Sota Watanabe, the CEO of Astar Network, a multichain smart contracts platform.
In his written responses to questions sent, the Astar Network CEO offered his thoughts on Webassembly and the role it will play in accelerating the adoption of Web3. Watanabe also explained why Astar Network is supporting both the EVM and WASM.
Below are Watanabe’s responses to questions sent to him via Whatsapp.
Bitcoin.com News (BCN): In very simple terms, can you explain to our readers what the WASM is all about?
Sota Watanabe (SW): Webassembly, more commonly called WASM, is a portable compilation target for programming languages. WASM supports a wide range of languages with native performance and high portability. On Astar, we support a WASM smart contract environment, just like Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). What’s nice about WASM is that most Web2 languages are composable into Webassembly, which is not true for Ethereum’s EVM which relies on a specialized programming language called Solidity.
We believe the growing use of WASM smart contracts will dramatically accelerate the adoption of Web3. Most of the tech talent still works in the Web2 space, and if Web2 developers want to enter Web3, they have no choice but to learn a new programming language called Solidity which is used by the most popular smart contract platform today (EVM). That’s an obstacle. Imagine if they could build Web3 dapps [decentralized applications] using the languages they…
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