What’s the point of a non-EVM chain? A Technical deep-dive with Zenllama

Kevin (@zen_llama) is a former Apple (AirPods) and Solana Labs (Core) engineer. Kevin joins Sal & Dave in bringing his unique insight as a protocol engineer with experience across multiple blockchain ecosystems (ETH, Solana, Monad, and others) to provide a concrete explanation into why these different approaches exist and how they differ. Some interesting topics we discuss include: the key components of a blockchain, why multithreading matters for scalability in blockchains, Ethereum vs EVM Chain vs non-EVM Chain (like Solana), the advantages of scaling the EVM, how L2s differ from monolithic EVM chains (like Monad), and how Ethereum could one day be a multithreaded execution environment. While this is a longer and more technical episode than usual, there are tons of nuggets throughout our interview from the perspective of an engineer who’s been “chewing glass” for years.  (1:16) - The issues with the scalability trilemma (6:53) - Blockchains from first principles (15:17) - The value add of blockchains (22:03) - The flywheel effect (26:40) - Design choices for blockchains (29:57) - Storing blockchain history (42:06) - Bandwidth as a bottleneck (45:52) - Consensus and time to finality (1:02:04) - Separation of state and data (1:11:02) - Solana’s Runtime V2 (1:16:03) - Where Monad sits on the spectrum (1:21:00) - Modular Vs Monolithic (1:30:56) - Competition of a modular stack (1:35:57) - Which chain will win (1:42:53) - Why Solana posts votes on-chain -    - Podcast Resources Follow Sal: https://twitter.com/sal_coin Follow Dave: https://twitter.com/SolBeachBum Follow Unlayered: https://twitter.com/UnlayeredPod Subscribe on Apple: http://apple.co/3VyBSWI Subscribe on Spotify: http://spoti.fi/42q03J2 Subscribe on Google: https://tinyurl.com/5dwn2476 -    - Episode Resources Follow Kevin : https://twitter.com/Zen_Llama Vitalik’s Endgame Blogpost : https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/12/06/endgame.html