Ethereum has announced its plans to build a new version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Martin Becze, the Ethereum Foundation's JavaScript client developer, has also outlined the next stages of the EWASM initiative.

“Ewasm’s goal is to research and replace the EVM with Web assembly and secondarily, implement a client for the current system which can be efficiently JITed (or transcompiled) to WebAssembly,” Martin stated in the blog post.

A major piece of evaluating the WebAssembly for blockchain usage will be to build a test network. Martin believes that this year the focus of the Ewasm team will be bringing that test network to life. After going live, the testnet will enable hands-on work with EWASM for a wider audience; enable related work like experiments with casper to be done by providing a flexible platform for experimentation.

The blog stated that the track of EWASM is dedicated to its research and development, while the client integration track will be dedicated to developing the network and bring full and light clients into existence.

“The Ewasm project is being broken down into two main components: the Kernel Layer, which handles IPC and manages the state, and the core VM. This should enable us to use the same framework for different VM implementations,” he added.

Also, other individual projects in the Ethereum JavaScript (JS) that are all open source and encourage community participation, were mentioned including Networking, IPLD, Web3.js 1.0 incoming, Ethjs and TestRPC.