Precompiled smart contracts
We discussed smart contracts at length in Chapter 8, Smart Contracts. It is sufficient to say here that Ethereum supports the development of smart contracts that run on the EVM. There are also various contracts that are available in precompiled format in the Ethereum blockchain to support different functions. These contracts, known as precompiled contracts or native contracts, are described in the following subsection.
These are not strictly smart contracts in the sense of user-programmed Solidity smart contracts but are in fact functions that are available natively to support various computationally intensive tasks. They run on the local node and are coded within the Ethereum client; for example, Parity or Geth.
There are nine precompiled contracts or native contracts in the Ethereum Istanbul release. The following subsections outline these contracts and their details.
- The elliptic curve public key recovery function:
ECDSARECOVER
(the...