Featured Story 7 — A Different「Dfinity」| What is WebAssembly?

WebAssembly (WASM) is a binary instruction set designed for stack virtual machines, which was proposed in 2017. WASM is designed as a platform compilation target for high-level languages like C/C++/Rust, and has been supported by browser vendors such as Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla.

WASM has the characteristics of high efficiency, memory safety, undefined behavior, and platform independence. In the blockchain field, including Ontology, Polkadot, Ethereum 2.0, and DFINITY, perhaps all have plan to support the use of WASM to run smart contracts.

The original connection of DFINITY and WASM is that WASM co-designer Andreas Rossberg joined DFINITY as a technology and researcher, and participated in the development of Motoko language.

DFINITY Internet Computer aims to use WASM as a back-end and front-end virtual machine. DFINITY joined the WASM Standard Bytecode Committee, enabling the Internet Computer ecosystem to jointly establish a WebAssembly infrastructure with Internet giants under cross-industry trends, and at the same time enabling Internet Computers to build secure and efficient smart contract systems on a large scale.