Ten Years of Waiting: How JAM Will Become a Meaningful Future for Blockchain

In the world of blockchain, there are moments that define the entire industry. Ten years ago, Gavin Wood introduced the EVM—the virtual machine that became the “language” of the entire ecosystem. Now, it returns with a new project: JAM or “Join Accumulate Machine,” a protocol that we expect to be the next paradigm shift.

After EVM: How Technology Became the Standard

Significant industry changes don’t happen overnight. When Ethereum launched, it enabled developers to write code in a unified environment. The EVM was not just a tool—it became the de facto standard, the “lingua franca” of the entire Web3 world.

Similarly, the design of JAM is not limited to the Polkadot ecosystem. It is a highly abstract underlying architecture that could serve as the foundational design for the next generation of blockchain systems. The true significance of JAM lies in its ability to provide secure and distributed workload scheduling, making applications running on it naturally scalable.

The Developer Constellation: A Meaningful Shift

As the JAM project resonates worldwide, the energy of the development community has prompted meaningful reflection. Compared to Polkadot, the development of JAM grows in a more unique way—without a fixed corporate structure, no payroll system guaranteeing responsibility.

JAM developers voluntarily take responsibility, risking their own time and money because they believe in it. This is closer to the early Ethereum days, where a passionate community collaborated even without guaranteed profits. This atmosphere highlights a significant difference: they are not employees following orders, but builders with personal stakes in the future.

The Technical Pinnacle: Building from Zero

JAM is not just a simple upgrade proposal. It is a comprehensive redesign starting from the most basic principles. Comparing it to the history of technology, we see parallels with the x64 instruction set—how a simpler design became a universal standard due to market rationality.

Over hundreds of years of computing, instruction set architectures evolved based on industry needs. The key lesson here is that no previous leader is automatically guaranteed victory. Intel has a more advanced proposal, but the market chose a more practical approach with AMD. The same could happen in blockchain: JAM has the potential to become a unified foundation used by many chains.

The PVM (Programming Virtual Machine) used by JAM is a general-purpose instruction set. Chains that adopt it will benefit not only from scalability but also from cross-chain composability and integrated security.

Web3 Versus AI: The Significant Battle of Our Time

Amid the explosion of artificial intelligence, a significant threat is growing in society: the possibility that systems become more trustworthy than the truth. AI tends to “speed up trust, slow down truth”—because we don’t see the training data, we don’t understand the algorithms.

Society is investing in a “post-trust era” where there is no trust in everything or just trusting demagogues. The meaningful solution is not just regulation but a more robust technical foundation. This is where Web3 comes in.

The essence of Web3 is the opposite: “Reduce trust, increase transparency.” While AI relies on closed systems and institutional trust, blockchain offers a verifiable, decentralized alternative. It’s not perfect, but it provides a meaningful counterbalance in a world where everything seems objective yet manipulated.

The Future: From Code to Responsibility

For young developers joining JAM, Gavin’s message is clear: “Get in early and keep going.” Web3 is not an optional hobby but a responsibility for those who believe they can make a difference.

His own journey began with independent programming, no guaranteed success, starting as early as 2013. Over ten years, from being an independent developer to co-founding Ethereum, the path has proven that passion plus technical skill can make a meaningful impact.

The significance of JAM for the next five years is not just a technical achievement but proof that decentralized collaboration can surpass traditional corporate models. It’s not guaranteed to succeed, but it’s a meaningful opportunity to change the trajectory of blockchain and Web3 itself.