@inproceedings{9586ba29ce34411291da92572203e1ac,
title = "EVMx: An FPGA-Based Smart Contract Processing Unit",
abstract = "Ethereum blockchain uses smart contracts (SCs) to implement decentralized applications (dApps). SCs are executed by the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) running within an Ethereum client. Moreover, the EVM has been widely adopted by other blockchain platforms, including Solana, Cardano, Avalanche, Polkadot, and more. However, the EVM performance is limited by the constraints of the general-purpose computer it operates on. This work proposes offloading SC execution onto a dedicated hardware-based EVM. Specifically, EVMx is an FPGA-based SC execution engine that benefits from the inherent parallelism and high-speed processing capabilities of a hardware architecture. Synthesis results demonstrate a reduction in execution time of 72\% to 99\% for commonly used operation codes compared to CPU-based SC execution environments. Moreover, the execution time of Ethereum blocks on EVMx is up to 6 ×faster compared to analogous works in the literature. These results highlight the potential of the proposed architecture to accelerate SC execution and enhance the performance of EVM-compatible blockchains.",
keywords = "Blockchain, Blockchain Hardware, EVM, Ethereum, FPGA, Smart Contracts",
author = "Lemayian, \{Joel Poncha\} and Hachem Bensalem and Ghyslain Gagnon and Kaiwen Zhang and Pascal Giard",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2025 IEEE.; 49th IEEE Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 2025 ; Conference date: 08-07-2025 Through 11-07-2025",
year = "2025",
doi = "10.1109/COMPSAC65507.2025.00231",
language = "English",
series = "Proceedings - 2025 IEEE 49th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 2025",
publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.",
pages = "1708--1713",
editor = "Hossain Shahriar and Alam, \{Kazi Shafiul\} and Hiroyuki Ohsaki and Stelvio Cimato and Miriam Capretz and Shamem Ahmed and Ahamed, \{Sheikh Iqbal\} and Majumder, \{AKM Jahangir Alam\} and Munirul Haque and Tomoki Yoshihisa and Alfredo Cuzzocrea and Michiharu Takemoto and Nazmus Sakib and Marwa Elsayed",
booktitle = "Proceedings - 2025 IEEE 49th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference, COMPSAC 2025",
}