Track 3 · Ethereum & the EVM · lesson 1

Ethereum vs the EVM

7 min

People use "Ethereum" and "the EVM" interchangeably. They are not the same thing, and the difference explains why your Solidity skills work on forty different chains.

The EVM is a specification — a definition of a machine: its opcodes, their gas costs, how memory and storage behave. It is a document and a set of implementations.

Ethereum is one network that runs it, with its own validators, its own ETH, and its own history.

Anyone can start a network that runs the same machine. Many have.

Why so many chains feel identical

Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain, Avalanche — all EVM-compatible. The same bytecode, the same addresses, the same tooling.

That is why deploying to a new chain is often a config change rather than a rewrite, and why a bug in your contract is a bug on every chain you deployed it to.

Predict

You deploy identical bytecode to Ethereum and to Base. Do the two contracts share anything?

They share state — it is the same contract on two networksNothing but the code — separate state, separate balances, separate everythingThey share balances but not storage

Layer 2s are a different thing again

Arbitrum and Optimism are not merely EVM-compatible chains — they are rollups. They execute transactions off Ethereum, then post compressed data back to it, so Ethereum remains the settlement layer.

The practical effect: much cheaper transactions, with security ultimately anchored to Ethereum rather than to a separate validator set. The practical catch: withdrawing back to Ethereum can take days on some designs.

Check

What does it mean for a chain to be EVM-compatible?

It runs the same virtual machine, so the same bytecode and tools workIt shares Ethereum's validatorsIt can read Ethereum's state

Worth remembering

The EVM is a specification; Ethereum is one network that implements it.
Dozens of chains run the same machine, so bytecode and tooling transfer directly.
Chains share no state — the same address on two chains is two unrelated contracts.
Bridges connect isolated chains and are the most attacked infrastructure in crypto.
Rollups execute off-chain and settle to Ethereum, trading withdrawal delay for much lower fees.