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evmos/ethermint
Ethermint is a Cosmos SDK library for running scalable and interoperable EVM chains
Ethermint is a Go library that grafts an EVM execution layer onto Cosmos SDK chains, letting you run Solidity contracts on a Tendermint-based chain with IBC interoperability. It powers or powered several Cosmos EVM chains. The team has officially abandoned it and migrated all active work to the Evmos monorepo — this repo is a dead end.
The ante handler pipeline is well-structured, separating EVM and Cosmos transaction validation cleanly with distinct handlers for fee market, auth, and EIP-712. The JSON-RPC backend is unusually complete for a Cosmos chain — filters, websockets, tracing, and debug namespaces all have real implementations and tests. The EIP-712 signing implementation (ethereum/eip712/) handles both legacy and typed-data formats with fuzz tests, which is more rigorous than most comparable projects. Integration test suite uses Python+Hardhat against a real running chain rather than mocks, so the EVM compatibility guarantees are actually tested.
The repo is explicitly unmaintained as of April 2024 — the README leads with a warning that all development moved to evmos/evmos. Anyone forking this is inheriting a snapshot, not a living project, which is a serious problem for a consensus-layer dependency. The integration tests require Nix, which is a non-trivial setup barrier with no documented alternative for Linux/Mac without Nix. Cosmos SDK and go-ethereum dependencies are pinned to versions that are now significantly behind upstream, meaning you will hit merge conflicts and security patches immediately if you try to maintain a fork. The KV indexer for EVM events (indexer/kv_indexer.go) is a known performance bottleneck that was never properly replaced — the team's own ADRs acknowledge this.