Ethermint

WARNING: Ethermint is under VERY ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT and should be treated as pre-alpha software. This means it is not meant to be run in production, its APIs are subject to change without warning and should not be relied upon, and it should not be used to hold any value. We will remove this warning when we have a release that is stable, secure, and properly tested.

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.

Community

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

• Cosmos Riot Chat Channel
• Cosmos Forum