Ethereum
What is Ethereum, exactly?
Ethereum is the original smart-contract blockchain, launched in July 2015 by Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, and a co-founding team. It introduced the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) — a deterministic execution environment that any developer can deploy code to — and the Solidity language, which together created the smart-contract category that almost every other chain now competes within.
Ethereum transitioned to proof-of-stake in September 2022 (The Merge), reducing energy consumption by roughly 99.95%. Today most consumer activity happens not on Ethereum mainnet but on its Layer 2 rollups — Starknet, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, zkSync, Polygon zkEVM, Scroll, Linea — which inherit Ethereum’s security while delivering low fees and higher throughput.
Mainnet vs Layer 2 — which does DevMind build on?
We almost never deploy consumer-facing contracts directly to Ethereum mainnet anymore. The fee model just doesn’t fit consumer products at scale. Our default deployment targets in 2026 are:
- Base or Arbitrum for general EVM consumer apps — broad wallet support, mature tooling, cheap fees.
- Starknet when zk-proofs matter or when Cairo’s expressivity is a fit.
- Optimism when participation in the Superchain ecosystem (Base, OP Mainnet) is a deliberate choice.
- Mainnet only for high-value, low-volume contracts where users will tolerate higher fees — institutional, infrastructure, or settlement-layer use cases.
The EVM, Solidity, and the EVM-equivalent L2 ecosystem
Most Ethereum L2s are “EVM-equivalent” — they execute the same bytecode as mainnet, which means contracts written in Solidity (or Vyper, or Yul) can be deployed across multiple chains with minimal changes. Tooling — Foundry, Hardhat, Viem, Wagmi, OpenZeppelin libraries — works across the entire EVM ecosystem.
Starknet is an exception: it has its own VM and Cairo as its native language. The trade-off is recent: better zk-friendly properties and account-abstraction native, in exchange for a smaller ecosystem.
When does DevMind reach for Ethereum vs. alternatives?
We reach for Ethereum (mainnet or L2) when:
- The product needs to compose with existing EVM dApps (DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces, identity systems like ENS).
- The team or auditors prefer the maturity of Solidity tooling.
- The user base lives in EVM wallets (MetaMask, Rainbow, Coinbase Wallet) and switching them off is friction we don’t want to introduce.
We reach for Solana when transaction cost is the constraint; NEAR when consumer UX and native account abstraction matter; ICP when contract logic itself is unusually complex or stateful.
DevMind’s perspective
Ethereum (almost always via an L2) is our default Web3 deployment target for any project where ecosystem compatibility matters more than raw cost or speed. The pace of L2 progress in 2024–2026 has made “EVM but cheap and fast” the default, and that’s where we put most of our consumer Web3 work.