How to apply Proof of Stake for Ethereum with Ethermint

Ethermint is designed to be a Proof of Stake implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine built on top of Tendermint Core

What is it?

ethermint will be an implementation of the EVM that runs on top of tendermint consensus, a Proof of Stake system. This project has as its primary goals:

Hard Spoon enablement: This is the ability to take a token from the Ethereum mainnet and “spoon” (shift) the balances over to another network. This feature is intended to make it easy for applications that require more transactions than the Ethereum main chain can provide to move their code over to a compatible chain with much more capacity.
Web3 Compatibility: In order enable applications to be moved over to an ethermint chain existing tooling (i.e. web3 compatible clients) need to be able to interact with ethermint.

Implementation

Completed

Have a working implementation that can parse and validate the existing ETH Chain and persist it in a Tendermint store
Implement Ethereum transactions in the CosmosSDK

Current Work

Implement web3 compatible API layer
Implement the EVM as a CosmosSDK module
Allow the Ethermint EVM to interact with other Cosmos SDK modules

Next Steps

Hard spoon enablement: The ability to export state from geth and import token balances into Ethermint
Ethermint is a functioning Cosmos SDK application and can be deployed as its own zone
Full web3 compatibility will enable existing Ethereum applications to use Ethermint

Building Ethermint

To build, execute the following commands:

# To build the binary and put the resulting binary in ./build
$ make tools verify build

# To build the project and install it in $GOBIN
$ make tools verify install

Tests

Integration tests are invoked via:

$ make test

To run CLI tests, execute:

$ make test-cli

Ethereum Mainnet Import

There is an included Ethereum mainnet exported blockchain file in importer/blockchain
that includes blocks up to height 97638. To execute and test a full import of
these blocks using the EVM module, execute:

$ make test-import

You may also provide a custom blockchain export file to test importing more blocks
via the --blockchain flag. See TestImportBlocks for further documentation.

Source Code

https://github.com/ChainSafe/ethermint

Community

The following chat channels and forums are a great spot to ask questions about Ethermint:

Cosmos Riot Chat Channel

#blockchain #ethereum #ethermint #tendermint