# EVM and Solidity Basics

LightLink is fully EVM-equivalent and does not differ from Ethereum. To start building on LightLink, you need to learn the Solidity language and understand EVM basics.

Solidity is an object-oriented, high-level language for writing smart contracts.

Smart contracts are programs in the blockchain ecosystem. They can interact with accounts (users’ wallets), assets (tokens, NFTs), and other smart contracts. By implementing various functions, a developer can enable a contract to issue and manage a fungible token, govern another contract with voting, swap tokens, etc. Ultimately, the smart contract must store the execution results in its on-chain storage, i.e., update the state. The state usually stores constants and variables that might be updated later, users’ balances and allowances, flags, etc.

We recommend starting with the [official Solidity documentation](https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.23/). For references and smart contract templates, we suggest looking at [OpenZeppelin’s GitHub](https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/openzeppelin-contracts).


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