EVM is currently the most popular smart contract platform. Many new generation blockchains who claim to be faster and cheaper than Ethereum, would still keep the Ethereum compatibility, to attract Solidity developers allowing them to reuse existing toolchains and migrate existing contracts with minimal effort. Despite how bloated and expensive Ethereum has become, none of the challenger chains have taken any significant market share thus far.
It is clear to us that building a better, faster and cheaper Ethereum is not nearly enough. Just like Ethereum can do things Bitcoin can never do, which subsequently inspired many new innovations, Substrate and Polkadot are categorically different from Ethereum that will empower many new (chain level) innovations outside of the EVM sandbox.
On the Acala chain, there’re DeFi primitives (stablecoin, DEX and liquid staking), liquidity and users that can be tapped into, there are also innovations that are simply not possible on Ethereum - customizable economic policy, flexible fees, allowing users to pay transaction fee with any supported tokens; native cross-chain capabilities; on-chain governance apparatus (no more locked funds); full upgradability (no more contract migrations) and more.
We’d love to have all of these composable and compatible with EVM.