Vision Virtual Machine (VVM)

Vision Virtual Machine (VVM) is a lightweight, Turing complete virtual machine developed for the Vision's ecosystem. Its goal is to provide millions of global developers with a custom-built blockchain system that is efficient, convenient, stable, secure and scalable.

VVM connects seamlessly with the existing development ecosystem and supports VPOS. VVM is initially compatible with the EVM environment so that instead of learning a new programming language, developers can develop, debug, and compile smart contracts in a Remix environment using Solidity and other languages. Once you’ve built and uploaded your smart contract to Vision’s mainnet, it will be executed on the VVM of the FV node to be isolated from external connections.

Furthermore, VVM employs the concept of Photon. Different from the gas mechanism on Ethereum’s EVM, transaction operations or smart contracts on VVM are free, consuming no tokens. Technically, the total token holding does not restrict executable computation capacity on VVM.

Features of VVM

1. Lightweight

VVM adopts a lightweight architecture with the aim of reducing resource consumption to guarantee system performance.

2. Stability and security

With a meticulous design paradigm and fine-grained underlying operation code, VVM can guarantee the preciseness of every step of a computation, diminishing ambiguity to the largest extent. Out of security reasons, transfers and smart contract running cost only photon points, not VS, which exempts Vision from being attacked similarly to Ethereum for its mode of gas consumption. Stability of photon consumption is achieved while the cost of each computational step is fixed.

3. Compatibility

Currently, VVM is compatible with EVM and will be with more mainstream VMs in the future. Thereby, all smart contracts on EVM are executable on VVM. By connecting seamlessly to existing development ecosystem, higher efficiency can be achieved by developers. Needless to learn a new programming language, they can use mainstream programming languages for smart contracts such as Solidity to develop, debug and compile smart contracts in the Remix environment, which greatly reduces development costs.

4. Developer-friendly

Thanks to VVM’s photon setup, development costs are reduced and developers can focus on the logic of their contract code. VVM also offers all-in-one interfaces for contract deployment, triggering and viewing, for the convenience of developers.
The following interfaces are available in Vision Wallet-CLI:

• deploycontract(password, contractAddress, ABI, code, data, value)
• triggercontract(password, contractAddress, selector, data, value)
• getcontract(contractAddress) Developers can call these interfaces to deploy, trigger or check smart contracts.

Flowchart of Vision Virtual Machine

The above flowchart shows how VVM works:
Compilation of Vision smart contract→execution and computing engines of VM→Interoperation service layer for external interfaces

Put simply, the flow is as follows:

• Currently, VVM is compatible mainly with Solidity. The compiler translates Solidity smart contract into bytecode readable and executable on VVM.
• A virtual machine processes data through opcode, which is equivalent to operating a logic of a stack-based finite state machine.
• VVM accesses blockchain data and invokes External Data Interface through the Interoperation layer.

Internal Transactions

Background

Internal Transactions represent all transactions that have occurred in a smart contract call. Some important information included in the transaction are sender/receiver address in a token/vs transfer transaction, vs/token amount, and transfer status. Users can check all information about Internal Transactions in an internalTransaction list, which contains all transactions in a single triggerSmartContract or createSmartContract call.

Internal Transaction Information Structure

message InternalTransaction {
  bytes hash = 1;
  // the one send vs or token via function
  bytes caller_address = 2;
  // the one recieve vs or token via function
  bytes transferTo_address = 3;
  message CallValueInfo {
    // vs or token value
    int64 callValue = 1;
    // tokenId, vs should be empty
    string tokenId = 2;
  }
  repeated CallValueInfo callValueInfo = 4;
  bytes note = 5;
  bool rejected = 6;
}