Written by Karen, Foresight News
This week, a piece of financing news about Solana Optimistic Network (SOON) caught the author's attention. Although there was no venture capital investment, it won the favor and support of a large number of builders including Solana co-founder Toly.
When people mention Solana, they often think of its high-speed transaction processing capabilities and endless meme culture. However, hidden beneath these glamorous surfaces is Solana's powerful underlying software infrastructure - the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). As the execution environment for smart contracts on Solana, SVM stands out for its unique parallel processing (Sealevel) capabilities and local fee market mechanism.
Among them, the parallel processing capability enables SVM to process multiple transactions at the same time, significantly improving transaction throughput, while the local fee market can effectively avoid the surge in network-wide fees caused by a single application through smart contract-level fee control. Users are provided with a more flexible and economical trading experience.
Faced with the challenges of Ethereum's fee market and the performance bottleneck of EVM, SVM hopes to solve or alleviate a fundamental challenge. So how does SOON solve it? SOON plans to launch a SOON Stack that allows SVM L2 to be deployed on different L1 blockchains. The SOON Stack is supported by decoupled SVM, OP Stack, and configurable DA layer.
What is SOON’s background?
Before understanding SOON solutions and architecture, let's take a look at SOON's financing and team background. On August 27, SOON announced the completion of the Co-Builder round of financing. Although it did not disclose the specific amount of financing and there was no venture capital company among the investors, the investment lineup was quite impressive, and most of them were influential builders in the industry, including Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko (toly), Solana Foundation Chairman Lily Liu, Celestia co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam, Anza (Solana client Agave developer) Chief Security Officer CSO, AltLayer COO Amrit Kumar, Wormhole Foundation co-founder Robinson Burkey, Caldera co-founder Matt Katz, Coinbase Ventures Head Jonathan King, Solayer co-founder Rachel Chu, etc. The specific list of investors is shown in the figure below.
Regarding the SOON team, there are three core members:
1. Joanna Zeng (co-founder and CEO): also the founder of CryptoNYC community, and has worked as BD manager or supervisor at Aleo, Optimism Foundation, and Coinbase.
2. AndrewZ (co-founder and CTO): has 5 years of experience in Rust and 6 years of experience in Golang.
3. Nazreen (DevRel Director): Worked as a software engineer and technical trainer at AWS UK, with 7 years of software development experience and 3 years of Web3 development experience.
According to SOON CEO Joanna Zeng, she pitched SOON to 50 influential angel investors one by one last month and successfully won the approval of 44 of them.
In addition, SOON’s implementation refers to the SVM specification in the Agave repository of Anza (a development company spun off from Solana Labs).
What is SOON going to do?
SOON is currently focusing on two directions. The first is SOON Stack, a modular Rollup framework that combines SVM and OP Stack, allowing any SVM L2 to be deployed on L1 (such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Cosmos). The chain deployed using SOON Stack is called SOON Chain.
What is special about SOON Stack is that it uses the decoupled Solana SVM as the execution layer, separates execution from consensus by decoupling the transaction processing unit (TPU), removes the original Solana consensus, and allows TPU to be controlled by Rollup nodes, thereby serving a wider range of derivative needs. This decoupled design not only brings higher network security through a more powerful fraud proof system, but also allows the removal of voting transactions and reduces the waste of DA resources.
Secondly, SOON plans to cooperate with EVM RaaS (Rollup-as-a-Service) providers such as Caldera, AltLayer and Conduit to seamlessly integrate SVM RaaS into their service systems to simplify the user's deployment process.
In addition, SOON plans to launch SOON Mainnet on Ethereum and said, "Compared with other EVM L2 solutions, it can bring significant cost advantages to users, and transaction costs are expected to be reduced by 10 times." In order to promote ecological development, SOON The mainnet will also set up an incentive layer to attract SVM builders through token rewards.
How does SOON modular architecture work?
At the architectural level, SOON's modular design allows it to use any base layer (such as Ethereum, Bitcoin) as a settlement layer and configure the DA layer according to actual needs. This flexibility enables SOON Chain operators to choose the most cost-effective and efficient DA solution.
At the same time, SOON adopts OP Stack's decentralized fault proof mechanism to ensure the security and reliability of the system. In the future, SOON also plans to introduce ZK proof technology and consider adopting solutions such as RISC Zero or SP1 to optimize the user's exit experience from L2 to L1 and significantly shorten the exit time to 1 day.
There is no need to worry about interoperability issues and ecosystem fragmentation within the SOON Stack ecosystem. Through the combination of messaging repeaters and sequencers, each SOON Chain will have a central messaging program to achieve native interoperability with other SOON Chains.
Finally, with the release and stabilization of the Solana node validator Firedancer, SOON expects to further improve its network performance. SOON said that once Firedancer is stable, SOON will integrate the Firedancer client into the SOON Stack, thereby increasing the throughput of all SOON Chains, and the overall TPS is expected to reach about 650,000.
Foresight New Note: Firedancer is being developed by Jump Crypto, a client based on the C++ programming language designed to coexist with Solana Labs' existing validator client based on the Rust programming language, bringing client diversity to the Solana network while improving its network throughput, resilience, and efficiency.
