EVM Vs. SVM: How big is the lead of EVM over SVM?

Author: intern, Monad team member; Translation: Jinse Finance xiaozou

After listening to the debate between Justin Drake and Anatoly, it seems that many people believe that EVM will always dominate, mainly because of its leading advantage and network effect moat.

In my opinion, EVM's leading advantage is not as big as people think, and it is definitely not "insurmountable".

Assume that there are about 10 million active on-chain users per month (it may be less than 10 million, just use 10 million as an upper limit estimate).

Assume that the total potential market size is about 1 billion users.

Facebook's MAU (monthly active users) and DAU (daily active users) are 3 billion and 2 billion respectively.

Another example: Fortnite has 650M registered players and ~125M MAU.

It actually takes a breakthrough app to break the lead in the user dimension. Any chain that supports an app with 100M MAUs automatically becomes the #1 used chain and builds a user network effect that surpasses the largest existing chain.

If we assume 10M MAUs today and 1B potential MAUs in 10 years, we are at 1% penetration, which is definitely not enough to conclude the debate and say the EVM has won.

In my opinion, scalability is very important to be able to support an app with 100M MAUs, and Solana is currently the best choice/market leader to win an app with that scale.

There are a lot of ongoing vertical attempts to scale the EVM (i.e. Monad, and why I thought it was important and chose to join the team initially), so it’s clear that the SVM isn’t the clear winner here either.

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But it’s unrealistic to declare the race over at this point and say that the EVM won due to network effects.

If a successful breakout app goes viral and starts attracting millions of users, it may lose its user lead after 3 months.

Important note: there are many other network effects besides users, such as developers, development resources, TVL, mindshare and market cap, and a lot of rich collateral to support upper layer development, etc., but if another VM gets 10x the users of all other chains, the other components mentioned above will likely follow.

Scalability is a prerequisite for mass user adoption, increasing the scalability of the blockchain/infrastructure is very important, and of course, this is all based on the idea that at some point there will be a viral crypto app.

Scalability promotes apps with a large number of users, and viral apps do achieve a large number of users.

All of this is to say… the current dominance of the EVM is not insurmountable, and scaling the EVM is critical to ensuring its future position in the crypto space in the long run.

If a breakout app appears before the EVM scales, it is likely that another VM will dominate and gain a stronger network effect.

If the large number of users arrive, whoever can handle the necessary user scale will have the best chance of winning.