We're launching!

We're thrilled to announce that www.sim.io will be launching publicly tomorrow at 1 p.m. ET, following months of alpha testing and improvements. Your invaluable insights and support have been crucial in getting us here. We're immensely grateful for your time and expertise, especially as we didn’t know many of you before.

We'd greatly appreciate your help once more by asking you to share/quote our announcement Tweet/blogpost on X/Farcaster when it’s posted tomorrow. Your support could significantly boost our reach!

sim has been an incredibly ambitious project, especially for our small team. We've taken some bold steps that set us apart from the current offering and unlock new functionality:

• Our own EVM client optimized for instrumentation and parallel historical execution — at the current state it is already multiple orders of magnitude faster in historical execution than the fastest clients, letting users re-execute entire chains quickly.
• Unparalleled ability to hook, track and decode storage operations, letting you hook, track and understand storage/state changes.
• First EVM (that we know of) that can operate in a cluster and execute different chains simultaneously, allowing us to scale up, support faster backfills for more customers with less hardware.
• Introduction of our EVM Lambda, a serverless EVM Lambda enabling you to seamless interact with on-chain state in an off-chain computation enviorment (currently these off-chain computations are written in solidity, but our goal is to enable any language that compiles down to WASM)
• Bespoke streaming, compute and storage infrastructure that lets you built truly real-time applications
  -Visual IDE and workflows which lets you interact with the most low-level primitives with ease (With time we do intend to support a CLI and declarative code experience in the future)

These innovations allow sim to offer unparalleled capabilities for applications and pipelines that rely on onchain data.In the coming days and weeks, we'll be sharing various examples and tutorials to showcase sim's capabilities.

Thank you again for your continued support. We're excited to see what people will build with sim and how it might transform the ecosystem!

Stateful lambdas

By default, both EVM Lambda and Patch components have their state reset at each block. The benefit of this is it allows for very fast backfills as we can parallelize block execution. In some cases, however, it's really useful to maintain some state across blocks and you only want to run at the tip (or you're patient enough to tolerate sequential backfill). While it's still a very new feature that we're testing and improving, you can now run a stateful lambda. Learn how in our docs. If you're giving it a go, we'd also love to hear from you on Telegram as we're interested in learning more about your use cases.

Canvas locking/unlocking

Most of our sim.io orgs are active construction sites where we're supporting production apps in some canvases and prototyping new ideas in other canvases. If you're not careful, you could accidentally modify an important canvas. To reduce this risk, we've added a canvas locking and unlocking feature in the canvas. You can unlock or lock a canvas from the orgs dashboard or within a canvas (in the top menu). When a canvas is locked, it will render for all users, even those in the org, as a read-only canvas to avoid accidental edits. Want to make an edit? Just unlock it, make your edit, and lock it once more.