What is Grevm 1.0? The ‘Ultra-Fast’ Engine Powering Galxe’s Gravity Blockchain

As blockchain networks grow and serve more users, their scale—measured by the volume of transactions and participants—can both solve and create challenges.

Blockchains running programs that automate agreements, like smart contracts, often face significant challenges, especially those with large, active user bases. Too many users are trying to do things simultaneously, and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) at its center simply can’t do all the transactions the ecosystem wants in quick succession, one after another. Limited space on the blockchain can also increase competition for inclusion in blocks, driving up transaction fees during times of heavy use.

If there’s one thing that stops a growing platform from keeping its users happy, it’s slow and expensive transactions on its applications. Web3 distribution platform Galxe, one of the crypto world’s busiest platforms with over 31 million users, sought to address these common issues when designing its own tailor-made blockchain, Gravity.

In August 2024, Gravity introduced its Layer 1 Blockchain with the launch of its alpha mainnet: a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain and smart contract platform, built specifically to cater to the needs of the Galxe community’s 31 million-strong user base.

What is Grevm 1.0?

Grevm 1.0 is an open-source, parallel Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) runtime that is “the technological core” of Gravity, facilitating almost 800,000 daily transactions running on Galxe’s ecosystem. It’s based on revm, an EVM written in the programming language Rust.

What makes Parallel EVMs different from conventional EVMs is that they provide a way to run multiple transactions or smart contract operations simultaneously, rather than sequentially, which can help avoid performance bottlenecks during periods of very high demand.

How does Grevm work?

Grevm uses an algorithm inspired by BlockSTM, a type of parallel execution engine, to run its smart contracts. BlockSTM was put together by a team of researchers from Aptos, Mystem Labs, UCL, Chainlink Labs and MIT in 2022. BlockSTM is inspired by an academic approach in computer science known as Software Transactional Memory (STM).

Galxe’s team enhanced BlockSTM using data derived from its simulation results. Grevm also uses Asynchronous I/O in its algorithm, a design feature that enables programs to do other tasks while waiting for input or output tasks to finish, instead of pausing and waiting.

According to Galxe, incorporating Asynchronous I/O, a feature not present in the vanilla version of BlockSTM, allows it to perform better in many circumstances, such as when high latency is present.

What’s so special about Grevm?

Galxe’s benchmark testing indicates that Grevm is the fastest current open-source parallel EVM implementation to date.

For transactions that are fully parallelizable, Galxe claims that Grevm can be 4.13× faster than sequential execution, running at up to 26.50 gigagas/s. When Galxe simulated a high latency environment of 100 μs, it was found to run 50.84x faster than sequential execution, with 6.80 gigagas/s throughput.

This leap in performance is attributed to both the use of parallelized execution and the integration of asynchronous I/O operations—enabled by parallelism—which further amplifies the speedup by efficiently overlapping I/O operations.

In practice, Galxe explained that Grevm’s ability to handle computations in parallel will “elevate” DeFi protocols and dapps running on Gravity’s network, by allowing them to execute multiple transactions in parallel, minimize latency, and boost throughput.

Who’s building on Grevm and Gravity?

• Galxe Quest is a platform for building and engaging Web3 communities. Using a no-code solution, it allows numerous projects to create reward-based loyalty programs. Optimism, Arbitrum, Base and over 6,500 other Web3 projects use it to provide users with freebies like loyalty points and complementary NFTs.
• Galxe Passport is a digital identity product that allows users to securely store their identity information and use it across hundreds of supported applications.
• Galxe Score evaluates users based on their on-chain activities, project participation, and overall engagement in the Web3 community, providing a comprehensive view of their presence and reputation.
• Symbiosis is a cross-chain automated market maker (AMM) and decentralized exchange has integrated Gravity into its platform, which allows users to bridge assets between Gravity and over 35 blockchain networks.

What is Gravity’s G token?

The Gravity blockchain uses G as its native utility token, following a token migration from GAL in July. G is used to pay for gas fees on the network and to make payments on apps like Galxe Quest, Galxe Passport, and Galxe Score. G also grants users a variety of opportunities to participate in deciding the future of the Gravity network.

Users can stake their tokens to secure the network and participate in future governance decisions, deciding the future of the blockchain.

Where can you buy Gravity’s G token?

G can be purchased via major exchanges such as Binance, OKX, Upbit, and KuCoin. It’s also traded on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) such as Uniswap.

On Binance, you can buy G directly using USD; other exchanges offer trading pairs with Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), Wrapped BNB (WBNB), or Wrapped Ethereum (WETH).

What does the future hold for Grevm?

Grevm’s successor, Grevm 2.0, is pegged for release in early Q1 2025. The second iteration of Grevm will focus on refining parallel transaction processing to increase efficiency and precision. With continued testing and enhancements, Galxe expects that Grevm 2.0 will enable faster, more scalable solutions within Gravity’s ecosystem.

Grevm 2.0 will introduce fully Asynchronous I/O as well as “finer-grained” transaction-level concurrency, allowing related transactions to run in parallel once their dependencies are resolved.

Discover Grevm 1.0 here, or explore how Gravity is empowering projects to build scalable decentralized solutions with its $50 million initiative here.