EVM capabilities
The EVM and blockchain technology as a whole is nascent in terms of its development and technical capability, however, with that said, the EVM does provide 5 key functions that serve as the fundamental building blocks of Web 3.0.
- 1.EVMs provide an immutable record of account; this audit capability, fundamental to the EVM, comes in the form of a public ledger of transactions. Transactions (can be viewed on block explorers such as “Etherscan”) provide transparency and trust over operations related to their data or transfer of value. This enables us to record data being sent for monetization, for example, from your phone for AI algorithm training.
- 2.The store of programmatic value - smart contracts can hold crypto-currencies which have a value. Crypto-currencies native to each of these blockchains include ETH for Ethereum, GLMR glimmer for Moonbeam, UNQ for the Unique blockchain, CELO for the Celo blockchain and so on. By associating royalties with social posts, applications can autonomously execute these payments through smart contracts. The earnings from the collective are stored in the blockchain's native token, where the collective was created.
- 3.The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on an EVM blockchain. Think of it like a Domain Name Service, but has significantly different architecture due to the capabilities and constraints of the Solidity programming language. ENS is a map of human-readable names like collective.hashtag.name.eth.etc to machine-readable identifiers such as applications (Smart contract ethereum addresses). Like DNS, ENS operates on a system of dot-separated hierarchical names called domains. Your collective’s hashtag is registered within ENS and acts as a domain name for your #Collective campaign.
- 4.Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) is a single crypto-currency token that registers ownership of an asset. Popular usages of NFTs include artwork (such as the CryptoPunks), however, NFTs can be used to register ownership of (“viral”) videos, land ownership, property, individual songs, movies and other real-world assets. You can convert any post, including videos, songs, performances to an NFT from your phone, without the need to understand blockchain. These NFTs are stored inside your collective’s vault.
- 5.Governance: Users may also create their own crypto-currencies which can also be stored within applications (smart contracts) and programmatically accessed to provide governance i.e. voting and democracy systems. Crypto-currencies issued on the EVM can be used to create proposals and to vote for, against and abstain on democratically decentralized outcomes. Collectives provide governance over the store of value, i.e the Treasury and other relevant subjects for the collective.