Antshares releases lightweight general-purpose virtual machine Antshares VM

On November 14, China's benchmark blockchain project Antshares released the Antshares VM white paper and published the open source code on GitHub. The white paper describes a lightweight general-purpose blockchain virtual machine Antshares VM, which allows users to deploy and execute smart contracts on the Antshares blockchain, allowing digital assets to be upgraded to programmable smart digital assets.

Virtual machines are the most critical and core technology for implementing smart contract systems. Smart contracts are both the carrier of business logic and the implementation of technology. The execution of smart contract code requires a runtime environment, which is the so-called "virtual machine". On different blockchains, the ability of smart contracts to express business rules is limited by the capabilities supported by virtual machines. Blockchain application designers and developers must not only master the original characteristics of blockchain technology, but also fully understand the functions of the corresponding smart contract virtual machines.

At present, the designs of several blockchain virtual machines at home and abroad have certain performance differences due to their different blockchain systems. For example, Bitcoin's virtual machine is lightweight and clear, with good performance, but has limited support for high-level languages, state maintenance, and Turing completeness. Ethereum has a relatively more complete virtual machine system, but it is constrained by its perfect architectural design - either it is limited by performance bottlenecks within the architecture, or it calls external native code but breaks through the original architectural design. Hyperledger Fabric uses a strategy of leveraging power, which allows it to flexibly choose existing virtual machine containers and programming languages ​​on the market, but it also loses control over virtual machines and determinism. At the same time, the performance of the virtual machine of the sandbox mechanism will definitely be subject to certain constraints.

Zhang Zhengwen, founder of Xiaoyi, pointed out that

“When we designed the Antshares blockchain virtual machine, we envisioned a new design that could integrate the advantages of several blockchain virtual machines to a certain extent. Antshares VM, a lightweight general-purpose blockchain virtual machine based on opcodes, came into being.”

By comparing the virtual machine technologies used by Bitcoin, Ethereum, Fabric and other blockchains, Antshares VM has faster execution speed, better execution performance; more complete logic control support (Turing complete); high-level programming language support; more flexible ledger data interaction, state maintenance, etc.; scalable off-chain data interaction integration and can be used as a general virtual machine for various blockchains and other highlights.

"This time, Antminer has adhered to its consistent open source style and fully opened up its original code, which is not only conducive to community developers to better use and develop the system, but also in line with the spirit and mission of shared open source blockchain," said Zhang Zhengwen. "Of course, there is no absolutely perfect solution, otherwise there would not be so many differences, but we can start with the design that combines the advantages of the above virtual machines in specific scenarios, and continue to surpass and iterate to achieve perfection."

It is understood that Antshares VM has good performance, Turing-complete logic control, and can flexibly interact with data on and off the blockchain. Through high-level language compilers, it can support high-level languages. Through customizable system call functions, it can support any blockchain.

Antshares VM Github source code address:
https://github.com/AntShares/AntShares.VM
Antshares VM white paper address:
www.antshares.org/files/4007D7.pdf