Let’s talk about Solayer again: Why does it keep hitting new highs? What are its technical highlights?

Author: Haotian

Let's talk about $LAYER@solayer_labs, which has performed very well in the secondary market recently. In particular, why has the InfiniSVM technology roadmap attracted so much attention? What are the characteristics of the hardware-accelerated SVM expansion solution? And how will the Solana expansion ecosystem industry pattern after hardware acceleration break through? Next, let me talk about my prospective observations:

1) Different from the horizontal expansion route dominated by Ethereum in the past, the Solayer team showed a completely different expansion idea in the infiniSVM white paper: deeply optimizing SVM through hardware acceleration to create a million-level TPS blockchain network, which is essentially an expansion solution that deeply integrates hardware + software.

Looking back at the entire history of blockchain expansion, the earliest on-chain expansion idea was to achieve it through parameter adjustment (larger blocks, shorter block time), but this idea easily touches the blockchain impossible triangle dilemma; the layer2 expansion idea that emerged later was a horizontal expansion, and its core purpose was to divert transactions through layer2 (state channels, side chains, Rollups, etc.), which would undoubtedly sacrifice some global atomicity; and the hardware acceleration route explored by InfiniSVM is a new route that upgrades the expansion concept, while maintaining a single global state, to break through performance bottlenecks with the help of specialized hardware;

In short: InfiniSVM's expansion method is not to simply optimize the algorithm, but to reconstruct the SVM execution environment through a microservice architecture and hardware acceleration, and to rely on dedicated hardware to complete some key tasks, thereby achieving atomicity and consistency in the global state under high load.

2) Following this line of thought, many friends must be wondering why Solana's SVM execution environment requires hardware acceleration? From the data provided by the Solayer white paper, it can be seen that the current Solana verification node already requires a CPU above 3.1GHz, 500GB+ high-speed memory and 2.5TB+ high-throughput NVMe storage. Even with such a high configuration, the CPU utilization rate is only about 30% under high load, and P2P communication is close to the 1Gbps bandwidth limit of consumer-grade networks.

The question is, since the CPU is not fully utilized, why do we need stronger hardware? This actually exposes that Solana's current performance bottleneck lies in other aspects besides CPU computing power, such as: microservice processing architecture, which can isolate different processing links and match more suitable hardware resources; dedicated accelerators, which can assign specific tasks such as partial signatures to dedicated hardware, etc.

You see, InfiniSVM is not a simple hardware upgrade, but a redesign of the entire execution environment, providing more specialized hardware optimization solutions for each bottleneck link. For example, to improve the production efficiency of a workshop, it is necessary to redesign the hardware and software of the entire production line rather than simply increasing the number of workers;

3) So, what features of InfiniSVM's hardware acceleration solution are worth sharing?

1. Distributed microservice processing architecture. Previously, Solana's single transaction processing process can be decomposed into multiple extended processing links such as signature verification, deduplication, scheduling, and storage. In the InfiniSVM architecture, each link can be processed independently, avoiding the big problem of "one link is stuck and the whole line is waiting";

2. Intelligent transaction scheduling system. Originally, when Solana read and wrote transactions, they had to queue up for processing when they belonged to the same account, but InfiniSVM achieved that even under the same account, operations would not interfere with each other, thereby greatly improving its parallel processing capabilities. To put it bluntly, it further enhances the ability of refined management;

3. RDMA low-latency communication technology. Normal communication between nodes requires at least necessary steps such as packaging, delivery, and unpacking. RDMA can directly transfer the data of one node to the memory of another node, achieving a breakthrough in communication technology from milliseconds to microseconds, which can significantly reduce state access conflicts;

4. Distributed intelligent storage network. If a single account is allowed to undertake its account data, Solana used to be limited to 10MB, but InfiniSVM uses a distributed cloud storage solution to disperse data to different nodes, marked as fast lanes, slow lanes, etc., which not only breaks through capacity limitations, but also optimizes data access speed.

4) After explaining the problem of the technology upgrade route, I believe that many voices of "what's the use" have come out. In general, with the support of hardware acceleration, Solana's competitive advantage in layer1 competition can be further enhanced. Moreover, compared with the expansion performance of Ethereum layer2, which needs application data support in the ecosystem to show, this performance breakthrough of using hardware to achieve millions of TPS may only require the access of very few vertical scenarios to directly prove it, and the path to achieve it is shorter;

Change your thinking, take @jito_sol as an example, as Solana MEV infrastructure, its niche value in transaction sorting optimization, MEV extraction, and verifier income. If it could not be self-proven before the Solana MEME boom, after the MEME boom in the past year, Jito's way of optimizing the transaction system has become an indispensable part.

In fact, Solayer's current technical positioning is similar. Its upgrade method of making transactions perform better in the system is not obvious only in pure financial transaction scenarios, but if we think of the large-scale implementation of PayFi in the future, if we want Solana to perfectly carry the functions of high-throughput and low-latency payment settlement infrastructure, the performance of TPS will be clearly perceived. In addition, there are DePIN ecosystems, complex blockchain games, AI Agent application scenarios, etc.

Anyway, it is easier to see the value of a technical infra project by looking ahead than by looking at it from the perspective of whether it is currently Utility.