In 2021, over $6 trillion in transactions were settled on the Ethereum network, supporting the booming growth of blockchain applications such as DeFi, NFT, and games. However, as Ethereum can only process about 15 transactions per second, the surging demand for transactions has led to congestion on its network and high transaction fees.

As a result, some developers have started to build new blockchains with lower transaction costs and faster settlement, and offer EVM-compatibility to better attract both developers and users.

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a virtual CPU for Ethereum to execute codes of smart contracts. EVM-compatibility means creating an EVM-like code execution environment that makes it easy for Ethereum developers to migrate smart contracts to an EVM compatible chain without having to write the code from scratch again.

Popular EVM-compatible chains are BSC, Polygon, HECO, etc.