🦀 Why Rust Can’t Run on Ethereum’s EVM
Recently, I was searching around the web to see if I could write and run Rust code directly on the Ethereum blockchain---something like “Rust smart contracts on EVM.” I thought maybe there was a way to target Ethereum smart contracts with Rust’s safety and performance.
That led me to this Reddit thread where the answer quickly became clear:
❌ Short answer: No. Ethereum uses EVM (ethereum virtual machine) for its smart contracts. Solidity code compiles into EVM bytecode which is then compatible with Ethereum. If you were more informed on the matter you would be asking if Ethereum will ever ditch EVM or gain compatibility with other VM’s, in which case the answer becomes a little more speculative. No one knows for sure, and it likely won’t happen on Eth L1. However, it is possible in theory for layers on top of ETH to run different virtual machines.
⚙️ Why Rust Doesn’t Run on the EVM
The EVM is like a minimal virtual computer designed for blockchain consensus. It supports only a small set of deterministic opcodes (like PUSH, MLOAD, SSTORE) and is optimized for:
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🔁 Reproducible computation on all nodes
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⛽ Gas accounting
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🔐 Security through isolation
Rust, on the other hand, compiles down to native machine code or WebAssembly (WASM)---not EVM bytecode. So unless you create a custom compiler pipeline that converts Rust ➝ EVM bytecode (which is non-trivial), there’s no way to directly run Rust in the EVM environment.
🔧 Alternatives: Rust + WASM on Other Chains
While Rust can’t target EVM directly, it is a first-class language for WASM-based blockchains like:
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Polkadot / Substrate
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CosmWasm (Cosmos ecosystem)
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Near Protocol
These chains use WASM as their smart contract runtime, which Rust targets beautifully thanks to wasm-pack and wasm-bindgen.
Ok By!