Smart contracts
We discussed smart contracts at length in the previous Chapter 10, Smart Contracts. It is sufficient to say here that Ethereum supports the development of smart contracts that run on the EVM. Different languages can be used to build smart contracts, and we will discuss this in the programming section and at a deeper level in Chapter 14, Development Tools and Frameworks and Chapter 15, Introducing Web3.
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
.