Full Web3 Compatibility

Ethermint is fully compatible with Ethereum’s web3 interface as well as the existing tooling around Ethereum clients via RPC endpoints. For a developer who, for instance, has built an awesome wallet UI on Ethereum, it would take a trivial amount of time to port that application and run it on Ethermint. It just requires a change of a single value in your code—the URL you’re pointing to.

There’s something called Truffle. Truffle allows you to deploy your smart contract, where it talks to the underlying Ethereum node. The thing is, it can substitute that Ethereum node with an Ethermint node, and like magic, you’ve deployed your smart contract in Cosmos. That’s part of the interoperability story, where it takes a developer 10 seconds or less to switch between networks.

An Order of Magnitude Higher Throughput

A major advantage of using Ethermint over using Go Ethereum is that Ethermint is indisputably faster, as it runs on Tendermint’s PoS engine. The effect of building on top of a consensus engine that allows much higher throughput is that it becomes cheaper to execute smart contracts. Because Tendermint can process up to 20 times the number of transactions as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), it means you would never experience the slowness of a backlogged network from a buildup of transactions which end up driving up fees. So executing a smart contract in Ethermint equates to something on the order of 20 to 50 times the savings in transaction fees.

Unlimited Horizontal Scalability

One of the major issues plaguing Ethereum currently is scalability. Ethereum can process ~12.5 TPS and that’s where the networks caps out. Ethermint currently caps out at 200 TPS.

However, let’s say that the Cosmos Hub is live and that the network reaches the 200 TPS cap. Due to the modular design of the hub and its peg zones, we can easily spin up a second Ethermint zone; now we get a throughput of 400 TPS. Add two more Ethermint zones and we get 800 TPS. This method of achieving horizontal scalability is unique to the Cosmos network. And it’s infinitely scalable.

Instant Transaction Finality

Neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum’s PoW consensus protocols make ‘final’ decisions, and blocks can theoretically be reorganized to some past block height given a 51% attack. A block is said to be ‘final’ when there is no chance of it being revised. Since Nakamoto consensus provides no such revision guarantees, it is not actually considered to be consensus safe.

In Ethereum’s current PoW construction, because blocks are never ‘final’, you have to wait 6 confirmations before you can be “certain” that your transaction has made it onto the blockchain. Typically, 6 confirmations in Bitcoin takes about 60 minutes, and it takes 2 minutes in Ethereum. In Ethermint, you get Tendermint’s property of transaction finality, where blocks are finalized within ~1 second on average.

How This is Made Possible on Ethermint

We can guarantee instant transaction finality due to the way Tendermint’s consensus mechanism works. In Tendermint, consensus nodes go through a multi-round voting proposal process first before coming to consensus on the contents of a block. When a supermajority of those nodes decide on a block, then they run it through the state transition logic. In Ethereum, the consensus process is inverted, where miners pick the transactions to include in a block, run state updates, then do “work” to try and mine the block.