Insight into the competition among Solayer, SOON, and Sonic SVM

Author: JiaYi

If Ethereum reaches 10,000 TPS or higher in another parallel universe, what will the Crypto world look like?

As the most anticipated "seed player" of the new round of Solana ecosystem narrative in 2025, Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) seems to be gradually turning this hypothesis into reality through three game changers - Sonic, SOON, and Solayer.

Especially in the context of Solana's new narrative urgently needing to take over in 2025, these three leading players in the SVM ecosystem are trying to answer the industry's ultimate proposition of "high concurrency, low latency, and cross-chain compatibility" with differentiated technical paths. This article will also dismantle the deep logic of this SVM arms race from the three dimensions of underlying architecture, ecological strategy, and market positioning.

Why is SVM important in 2025?

"I am an Ethereum killer, send me money", with the era of easy land grabbing, financing, and hype of new public chains from 2018 to 2020 gone forever, few people have mentioned the "Ethereum killer" narrative in recent years.

To put it bluntly, games that simply copy the EVM architecture + TPS numbers can no longer meet the needs of Web3 evolution - According to the Electric Capital developer report, among the cryptocurrency ecosystems with the fastest new developers in 2024, EigenLayer, Aptos, and Solana ranked in the top three, with growth rates of 167%, 96%, and 83%.

In terms of developer share, Ethereum is still the largest ecosystem on each continent, but Solana, ranked second, is the preferred ecosystem for new developers. This is also the first ecosystem to attract more new developers than Ethereum since 2016.

This shift reflects a profound change in industry cognition: the blockchain war has shifted from a "narrative battle" to an "execution environment revolution", especially after Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) has completed its architecture upgrade and new developers have flocked to it. In essence, it is not to replace a public chain, but is expected to reconstruct the technical paradigm of the entire smart contract execution layer.

So what exactly is SVM? Its full name is Solana Virtual Machine, which is the execution environment for processing transactions, smart contracts and programs on the Solana network. It is designed to solve specific expansion and user experience problems.

As we all know, the traditional EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) has done a good job in compatibility, but in high-frequency application scenarios such as games, DeFi, social networks, etc., the performance often cannot keep up. SVM is based on Solana's core performance and provides extremely fast transaction speeds and lower Gas fees.

The most critical SVM supports parallel processing of transactions, unlike EVM, which has to queue up one by one to process (just like there is only one cashier during peak shopping hours). The advantage is that multiple transactions can run at the same time, and it is still fast during high-demand periods, and the handling fee is still low.

When Solana ecology gave birth to SVM, Sui and Aptos built MoveVM, the technological evolution of the Crypto ecology presented a clear strategic roadmap: the core battlefield of the next generation of blockchain wars is shifting from the consensus layer to the innovation of the execution environment.

SVM itself is an extension of Solana's influence - the better SVM does, the greater Solana's influence.

The technical path and ecological ambition of the three SVM heroes

SOON: Movement of SVM

In objective comparison, SOON's positioning is more like "Movement in SVM", that is, it prioritizes being close to the community in construction.At the same time, a relatively different point is that financing is completed through co-builder rounds and community fair launch models.

So if Movement brought Move to Ethereum, then SOON is a step further and can bring SVM to all L1s: and it is quite different from the imagined "Solana L2". It does not rely on the Solana mainnet, but provides flexible expansion capabilities through the SOON Stack, so that SVM can be deployed on other mainstream Layer1s.

This design allows L2 of any public chain ecosystem to enjoy the advantages of SVM, including faster transaction speeds and lower Gas fees. Therefore, SOON and other SVMs face completely different execution environments, which requires higher-performance Rollup and technology stacks to assist.

After all, the multi-chain prosperity of the pan-EVM ecosystem forces developers to reinvent the wheel (multi-chain deployment of one project), resulting in a decline in product quality and user fatigue. SOON can be regarded as a unified environment that concentrates resources, which actually greatly optimizes the developer experience.

Speaking of the fee issue, Ethereum's "global fee model" is really not considerate - a popular NFT auction can push up the cost of your ordinary transactions. In contrast, SOON's localized fee market is very good: spend as much as you should, without interfering with each other.

At the same time, SOON's private placement round also attracted a number of well-known projects (Solana, Celestia, etc.), and allocated 51% of the tokens to NFT buyers, and also responded to the opinions of the community at the first time, which coincides with the idea of ​​Movement - valuing the community and being willing to listen to the voice of the community, and ultimately jointly promoting the success of the project and enjoying its positive effects.

From the actual project progress, SOON development progress is also the fastest among the three SVMs. To some extent, SOON is not only the "volume king", its design is actually solving the "old problems" of EVM and Solana. If you are a market operator, you might as well learn some tricks from its community and resource concentration methods - a win-win situation of user experience and efficiency is not a dream~

Solayer: I have TVL and I have efficiency

In the past year, Solayer's narrative switching can be called textbook level: from "re-pledge agreement" to "RWA stablecoin" to "hardware accelerated SVM", each time it accurately hits the market hotspot.

I have always said that the team's cognition and execution, plus luck, are the ceiling of the project. Founders Rachel (former Sushiswap core developer) and Jason (founder of MPCVault) have both product and technical sense, and the acquisition of Fuzzland to strengthen chain security is evident - fast narrative switching, strong financing, and full execution.

I first heard about Solayer more than a year ago, when EigenLayer was on fire, and Solayer turned out to focus on the staking direction on Solana, and became the "Solana version of EigenLayer".

For this reason, Solayer started in the SOL staking ecosystem, especially based on Solana's staking data and infrastructure, laying a solid initial foundation. However, the latest developments show that Solayer is no longer limited to staking, but has begun to get involved in the SVM technology track.

What is the core competitiveness of a project that started with pledge and entered the SVM technology field?

In fact, there is a key node that cannot be ignored, that is, Solayer acquired the technology company FuzzLand and created Solayer InfiniSVM together. It is with this opportunity and handle that Solayer started a new narrative layout, and aimed at the first public chain to implement hardware acceleration expansion solutions, and finally realized high-speed public chains:

Solayer's 2025 roadmap proposes "Infiniband RDMA technology", targeting one million TPS+100 Gbps, and its hardware acceleration claims that it offloads the key operations of the blockchain to dedicated hardware components, which are responsible for various operations from transaction sorting, scheduling to storage, so that transaction confirmation can be achieved in 1 millisecond. If the technical solution can be implemented, it is indeed expected to achieve a large multiple of Monad.

To put it simply, in Solayer Chain, each transaction follows a set of workflows. The transaction first enters a scalable entry cluster consisting of hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes. These nodes will clean and pre-execute the transaction based on the probabilistic prediction of the future state.

Afterwards, all execution snapshots will be sent to a sorter built with Intel Tofino switches and additional FPGAs. It is worth noting that most transactions have been confirmed as valid in the pre-execution stage, so there is no need to execute them again on the sorter.

Don't understand? It doesn't matter, now there is a simple example to help you understand:

• Imagine you are queuing for security at an airport, and everyone's luggage will be scanned by a machine (corresponding to the cleaning and pre-execution stage of the transaction). Most of the luggage is generally fine and can be released directly;

• However, if the machine finds that a piece of luggage has a suspected problem (conflicting transaction), it will be sent to a more advanced inspection station for detailed inspection (sequencer and re-execution). This inspection station is equipped with top-level detection equipment and professionals (Intel Tofino switches and FPGAs) to ensure that the inspection of luggage is both efficient and fair;

• In this airport, simple luggage inspection can process 16 billion pieces per second (TPS of simple transactions); even problematic luggage can process 890,000 pieces per second (TPS of conflicting transactions);

• In other words, the airport (solayer's SVM) can handle routine luggage inspections of billions of passengers and complex inspections of millions of problematic luggage at the same time in one second, ensuring efficiency while taking care of special circumstances;

Like SOON mentioned above, Solayer also obtained Solana The two rounds of financing have attracted investment from Solana co-founder Toly, as well as support from top institutions including Binance Labs (now YZi Labs) and Polychain.

Sonic SVM: The "Breaking Engine" of Chain Game Infrastructure

Sonic SVM is the earliest TGE project in the SVM track, and has been launched on most mainstream exchanges except Binance.

Unlike the SVM projects mentioned above, Sonic SVM focuses on games - the innovative design is mainly aimed at the high concurrency and instantaneous transaction requirements in game scenarios.

The entire Sonic SVM technology is built on the HyperGrid framework, which is also Solana’s first concurrent expansion framework. The original design intention is to achieve high customization and scalability while maintaining native composability with Solana.

Because HyperGrid supports developers to write applications in the EVM environment, but ultimately executes on Solana, and the settlement layer is still Solana, it is more convenient for developers to write projects in existing familiar programming languages, reducing the time to get started and understand the new public chain.

It is worth mentioning that Sonic SVM is the first Grid instance in the HyperGrid framework - is it very similar to the relationship between Virtuals and Luna?

In addition, Sonic's Guardian Nodes system focuses on the verification of user behavior on the chain. Through this mechanism, it effectively prevents robot attacks and malicious behaviors, provides a safer interactive environment for gamers, and the operation of nodes also provides a guarantee for the stability of network performance.

Another key highlight of Sonic is its TikTok Mini App - SonicX. With the help of TikTok's huge user base, SonicX generates a wallet bound to the TikTok account for users through a simple login method, thereby achieving seamless account abstraction.

This design greatly lowers the entry threshold of Web3, allowing ordinary users to participate in various blockchain activities without having to understand private keys and on-chain operations (As a side note, TikTok is currently facing policy risks in Europe and the United States, and its traffic prospects are always shrouded in a shadow, so whether this new user acquisition channel can work for a long time is a challenge).

Overall, the three major projects in the SVM track have their own characteristics:

• Sonic SVM:Through TikTok diversion and seamless on-chain interaction mode, the focus is on the blockchain game experience;

• Solayer:Focus on improving efficiency with higher performance, combining the original re-staking and liquidity optimization to expand the ecosystem;

• SOON:Mainly starting from the community, learning from Movement's idea to expand SVM to the entire blockchain world;

Conclusion