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Quirks

Supporting EVM on Zilliqa involves:

  • Building an execution engine based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. This allows us to run EVM programs and, thus, compiled Solidity contracts.
  • Supporting enough common precompiles to make common-case contracts work.
  • Supporting a "sufficient" subset of the Ethereum API calls. This allows users to create EVM contracts, use common Ethereum tools like hardhat and truffle to write contracts, and interact with Zilliqa using Ethereum-standard software like Metamask.
  • Arranging to execute EVM transactions, and store EVM-style state.

There are, inevitably, some differences from other EVM chains, which will be listed here and in the FAQ.

Execution engine

Our execution engine is based on continuation passing and the Sputnik VM.

This allows us to call Scilla from EVM, via precompiles, and, one day, EVM from Scilla via message passing.

Gas use

Because ETH and ZIL differ in the number of decimals they support, we scale EVM balances by 6 decimal places.

If we maintained a 1-1 relationship between ethereum gas and ZIL gas (see Gas], EVM would be dramatically more expensive than Scilla; in order to ameliorate this, we scale ethereum gas when charging and for technical reasons, the scaled value (ie. the scilla-equivalent gas price is what we track under the hood).

As a result, rounding occurs, and the amount of ethereum gas you are charged for a transaction will be slightly less than the amount estimated, in order that the effectiveGasPrice * gasUsed is equal to the deduction made for gas.