> EVM-compatible, built on Reth

Anyone know what this actually means? Both literally (what is Reth?) and what it means qualitatively: are Stripe’s crypto efforts competing with Ethereum or strengthening it?

EVM - ethereum virtual machine, meaning the execution layer for smart contracts, typically written in Solidity.

Reth - ethereum protocol client written in rust. https://github.com/paradigmxyz/reth

Over the past few cycles much of the innovation in the crypto industry has standardized on a instruction set architecture that being the EVM. This won't make sense if you think blockchains are databases because the forefront of the field uses them as full distributed computers (state machines). But with every ne L1(bitcoin, eth, ripple, think base blockchain), there were different instruction set it was essentially the old desktop environment where apps were siloed to platforms(Windows, Linux, Apple). The EVM has become the cross chain dominant instruction set so people who build apps on one chain can insta port the code to other evm compatible chains.

Reth is a rust implementation of the EVM used for running nodes, made by a very prominent research and venture group.