EVMOS? A computer OS or what?
Introduction
If you go on Google right now to search up for EVMOS, the description for it is, “Evmos is an application-agnostic chain that will be interoperable with the Ethereum Mainnet, EVM-compatible environments, and other BFT chains via IBC, making it easy for users and developers to easily move value between chains.”
But what does that mean… in simpler terms? Why should we even be looking at EVMOS, and of course, how do I get my hands on some EVMOS?
Disclosure: I am investing in EVMOS the moment it launches because I’m a degen. My entire financial future is in the hands of the devs, and this statement is to disclose any conflict of interest and is not a recommendation to purchase any tokens/NFTs. This content is for informational purposes and should not be treated as investment advice.
What is EVMOS?
EVMOS is short for EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) on Cosmos, and is built using the Cosmos SDK with IBC compatibility. This allows any developer building on EVMOS to have the best of both worlds in terms of tooling and exchange of value.
Now I know this sounds very technical, so let’s visualize it.
The Problem
The first point to note is that blockchains are silo-ed by design because they have different consensus mechanisms which underpin the security of the blockchain and as a result, this stunts the progress of DeFi because liquidity is sharded between multiple blockchains.
In a typical scenario when you want to transfer tokens over from any chain in Cosmos to an EVM compatible chain (ie. UST from Terra to UST on Ethereum), you would use a bridge.
Basically, when you send assets (in this case, UST from Terra) from one blockchain to another blockchain, the assets are not “sent” over there. The assets are actually locked in a smart contract on the native blockchain, and new tokens of equal amounts are then minted on the bridged blockchain.
From a user’s perspective, this might hinder them to test out new dApps on various blockchains because it ‘seems complicated’, thus sharding liqudity.
Next up, because Ethereum apps (or any EVM compatible chain) is written mainly with Solidity, and Terra (or any chain with *IBC enabled) is written with Rust, if an application wanted to port over from ETH to Terra, they would have to spend tons of time to rewrite the smart contract from scratch.
*IBC, in short, is Interblockchain Communication which allows any platforms building on Cosmos to communicate with one another easily, thus removing the need for a bridge
Meet EVMOS
With EVMOS, any EVM compatible dApp that wants to connect with the greater Cosmos ecosystem via IBC, without the need to rewrite their whole contract, can.
This makes the progress of developments faster because developers can now stick to whatever they are comfortable with, and from a user’s perspective, this is a huge step towards true interoperability as this allows access to liquidity across most networks without the need to shard or bridge them.
Right after launch, we will mostly likely see bluechip DeFi projects on Ethereum (such as Aave) deploy on EVMOS for this particular reason and others such as the fast transaction finality and high throughput of the Tendermint consensus model (which is what Cosmos uses) thus allowing faster transactions and lower fees.
EVMOS will also allow for cross-chain contract calls, so one day in the future, you could be using NFTX to stake a Terra NFT, or taking out a loan on Aave using OSMO/SCRT.
Launch Details
EVMOS mainnet will go live on the 3rd of March at 6pm UTC.
There will be an initial supply of 200m, and 50% of it will be part of the airdrop, with the other 10% for the community pool and 40% for the strategic reserves, which accelerates the growth of the EVMOS ecosystem.
Rektdrop
The airdrop consisting of 100m tokens at genesis will be based on a few parameters, ranging from users who got rugged to users who used protocols on Ethereum and stakers of the greater Cosmos ecosystem.
Right now, you can check how much airdrop you can claim with: https://rektdrop.com/
Where to buy?
When EVMOS token launches, you can buy it from Exswap and Diffusion, both of which are Uniswap v2 forks that will be going live the moment EVMOS mainnet is live.
Conclusion
Personally, I will be buying into EVMOS because this is definitely a huge step towards interoperability and is probably, what I feel, is one of the major reasons why normal users don’t really explore the various ecosystems as much.
If I were a first-time crypto user and had to bridge between one ecosystem to another to try out new products or apps… I don’t think I will. With EVMOS it makes things so much easier, not just from a developer’s POV but as a user as well.
Other Readings
If you want a more technical writing about how EVMOS works, you can definitely take a look this article: https://rainandcoffee.substack.com/p/the-connection?utm_source=url&s=r
If you want to deep dive into the tokennomics (ie. inflation & gas fees etc) of EVMOS, take a look at: https://evmos.blog/the-evmos-token-model-edc07014978b
Stay safe and have fun degens, until next time!
