Design Principles

These boundaries apply to everything we ship.

Service boundaries

• Stateless / BYOS — Callers supply bytecode and state overrides. No archive node, no mainnet sync.
• Raw bytecode, base-layer only — No Solidity compilation in the service. ERC/application-layer concerns are out of scope.
• Observability first — Rich execution traces (stack, memory, gas, opcodes) are a primary deliverable.
• Intent-driven MCP tools — Tools match use cases (simulate bytecode, generate BAL, …), not raw library APIs one-to-one.
• Hard wall — No sequential multi-block historical backtesting (archive-node / revm territory).

Engine design

• Query shapes, not library APIs — generic verbs (simulate, compare, generate, probe); structured, diffable results.
• Fork = capability set — (baseHardfork, eips[]) à la carte; named forks are curated shortcuts.
• Provenance on every result — engine version, fork config, optional EIP maturity metadata.

End-user summary: Capabilities, Guarantees.

Changelog

Design Principles Changelog

1. v0.32026-07-20Consolidated from overview and execution-engine under internals/.