EVM/Solidity Based Smart Contracts

The current release of IOTA Smart Contracts has experimental support for EVM/Solidity smart contracts, as well as Wasm based smart contracts, providing limited compatibility with existing smart contracts and tooling from other EVM based chains like Ethereum. This allows us to offer the existing ecosystem around EVM/Solidity a familiar alternative.

What is EVM/Solidity

EVM stands for "Ethereum Virtual Machine" and is currently the tried and tested virtual machine running most smart contract implementations.

Solidity is the programming language of choice with EVM, which was created for this specific purpose.

The main benefit of using EVM/Solidity right now is its sheer amount of resources from years of development and experimentation on Ethereum. Many articles, tutorials, examples, and tools are available for EVM/Solidity, and the IOTA Smart Contracts implementation is fully compatible with all of them. If you have experience developing on other EVM based chains, you will feel right at home. Any existing contracts you've written will probably need no (or very minimal) changes to function on IOTA Smart Contracts.

How IOTA Smart Contracts Work With EVM

Every deployed IOTA Smart Contracts chain automatically includes a core contract called evm. This core contract is responsible for running EVM code and storing the EVM state.

The Wasp node also provides a standard JSON-RPC service, which allows you to interact with the EVM layer using existing tooling like MetaMask, Remix or Hardhat. Deploying EVM contracts is as easy as pointing your tools to the JSON-RPC endpoint.