Evmos launches blockchain to bring Ethereum Virtual Machine to Cosmos

After years of development, Evmos (formerly called Ethermint) went live on the Cosmos network, its developers announced Wednesday.

The launch means users and developers can now access it as a Layer 1 blockchain on Cosmos — an interoperability protocol whose ecosystem contains more than 250 apps and services.

In particular, the Evmos launch allows users to deploy smart contracts and assets from Ethereum and use them in the Cosmos ecosystem. Evmos had been slated for a February launch that was delayed amid technical issues.

Evmos’s EVM Ambitions

The newly-launched Evmos was first conceptualized in 2016 as Ethermint. What’s different about Evmos is that unlike most other Cosmos chains, it is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, a computing environment used by developers on the Ethereum blockchain.

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By integrating the EVM mechanism, the Evmos team hopes to make it more appealing to Ethereum developers and to attract applications and assets from them. Over the last year, EVM has become the most widely adopted standard for smart contracts, and is now found across a number of blockchains trying to replicate Ethereum’s success. These include Avalanche, Polygon, BNB Chain, Fantom and Moonbeam.

To kick-start its ambitions, the Evmos developers plan to first achieve interoperability with Ethereum through bridges. The team is working with bridge applications including Connext, Celer, Nomad and others so token transfers can be made between the two chains. “Through these bridges, crypto users will be able to move assets to Evmos and use them on Evmos’s own applications,” Federico Kunze Küllmer, the co-founder of Evmos, told The Block. 

There are plans for Evmos to expand within the Cosmos ecosystem as well. Using a protocol called Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), the Evmos blockchain has the ability to share data and assets with other Cosmos-enabled chains.

This interoperability opens up direct interactions for Evmos applications with Terra — a Cosmos-based blockchain containing $29 billion in crypto assets that is home to the third-largest stablecoin, TerraUSD (UST). Terra’s governance has already proposed a collaboration with Evmos for UST and allocated $8 million to boost liquidity on Evmos. 

There are also applications set to launch on Evmos — decentralized exchanges, money markets and NFTs, including EvmoSwap, QuantumSwap, Diffusion Finance, Nomad, Coslend and others.

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