Parallel EVM Is Real

Parallel EVM implementations are shipping and the performance gains are real. The traditional EVM executes transactions sequentially. One after another, no matter how many cores you have. That's finally changing.

The trick is detecting which transactions touch the same state. If two transactions are independent, run them in parallel. If they conflict, serialize them. The execution engine becomes a dependency graph solver.

Benchmarks on the new chains show the throughput increases are impressive. Not the 100x some marketing claims but solid 5-10x improvements on realistic workloads. That's meaningful.

The complexity is in the edge cases. Speculative execution means sometimes you guess wrong about conflicts. You run transactions in parallel, one writes to state the other reads, now you have to rollback and redo. The overhead matters.

Smart contract developers don't need to change anything which is the beautiful part. The parallelism is handled at the execution layer. Existing code just runs faster.

This feels like one of those infrastructure improvements that unlocks new application categories. When compute is cheap, developers get creative. It will be interesting to see what people build when gas stops being the primary constraint.