Inside the EVM: From Architecture to Implementation

Developers build DeFi protocols, DAOs, and countless other applications on Ethereum every day using smart contract languages like Solidity and Vyper. Yet beneath all of them sits the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) — the execution engine that powers the entire ecosystem, and still remains a black box to most developers building on it.

This talk opens that box from two perspectives.

From the smart contract developer's angle, we'll walk through the EVM's architecture and core components — the stack, memory, transient storage, and more — and show why understanding what happens beneath your Solidity code leads to better gas optimization, safer contracts, and sharper debugging instincts. It's also key to understanding how many smart contract hacks actually work.

From the protocol developer's angle, we'll go behind the scenes of how the EVM itself evolves: how a new feature is proposed, how EIP specs are written, how the implementation comes together, and how multi-client testing keeps consensus intact. We'll give special attention to how gas costs are defined, and the rationale behind the repricing EIPs landing in Ethereum's next hard fork, Glamsterdam.