Author: KarenZ, Foresight News
This week, the Solana ecosystem's restaking project Solayer unveiled its 2025 roadmap, with the core highlight being the upcoming hardware-accelerated SVM blockchain—'Solayer InfiniSVM'. For Solayer, 'Solayer InfiniSVM' is undoubtedly an important part of achieving its long-term vision.
Solayer's Chief Engineer Chaofan Shou joined the Solayer team after abandoning his PhD studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He revealed that the team drew significant inspiration from Solana's validator client Firedancer during development and decided to offload most of Solana's components to SmartNICs and programmable switches. This approach greatly enhances the network's processing capacity, making transaction processing more efficient.
In Solayer Chain, each transaction follows a workflow. Transactions first enter a scalable entry cluster composed of hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, which clean and pre-execute transactions based on probabilistic predictions of future states. Then, all execution snapshots are sent to a sorter built with Intel Tofino switches and additional FPGAs. Notably, most transactions are confirmed as valid during the pre-execution stage, so there is no need for re-execution on the sorter. For the remaining conflicting transactions, the sorter of Solayer Chain will use a state-of-the-art (SOTA) scheduling algorithm based on the fine-grained account access patterns collected during pre-execution to ensure fairness and efficiency of transactions.
In terms of performance, Chaofan Shou stated that for simple workloads, Solayer Chain can achieve a transaction processing capacity of over 16 billion transactions per second (TPS); for conflicting workloads, it can also reach 890,000 TPS. This means that on Solayer Chain, billions of USDC transfer requests can be processed every second, along with millions of transactions of users apeing the same memecoin on Raydium.
So how is Solayer InfiniSVM actually implemented?
How does Solayer Chain achieve this?
According to the Solayer Chain Lightpaper, Solayer Chain achieves infinite scalability of a single state blockchain by distributing workloads between dedicated hardware and clusters while maintaining a global atomic state.
Solayer stated that through SDN (Software Defined Networking) and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) connections, 100 Gbps can be achieved while maintaining atomic state. Solayer InfiniSVM achieves 1ms transaction confirmation by offloading to hardware circuits and kernels, spanning incoming, sorting, scheduling, banking, and storage.
Here is a brief overview of the Solayer Chain workflow:
1. Transaction Incoming: Each transaction enters an initial entry point as shown in the top left corner of the diagram, where signature verification (sigverify) and local deduplication are performed (to avoid duplicate transactions);
2. Pre-execution Stage: Verified transactions are then sent to a pre-execution cluster for pre-execution.
3. Sorting and Scheduling: Transaction results and intermediate snapshots are sent to the sorter via InfiniBand (which provides a high-speed, low-latency network architecture tailored for high-performance computing and data center environments). The sorter uses SDN switches and FPGAs to determine whether a transaction takes the simple path or the complex path.
Simple Path: If all accounts are at their latest version during pre-execution, state changes will be applied directly via RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), using local cache on the SDN to avoid further processing by the sorter.
Complex Path: If at least one account has an updated version, the transaction will enter the local memory pool. The sorter schedules transactions in the local memory pool to achieve fairness and optimal parallel execution for all transactions.
4. State Update: The state changes of executed transactions are updated in the sharded database. The sharded database uses the RDMA protocol for efficient cross-node data access.
5. Transaction Broadcasting: After the transaction is executed and state changes are written, the transaction will be broadcast through global PoPs (Points of Presence, network access points).
In terms of consensus mechanism, Solayer Chain employs a Proof-of-Authority-and-Stake hybrid consensus protocol, batching transactions into shards, each shard containing a slot number, transaction vector, version metadata of the accessed accounts, and a linking hash. Trusted entities act as sorters and publish shards, and validators stake and vote to decide whether the shards can be accepted.
It is worth mentioning that Solayer Chain not only focuses on performance but also introduces several user experience improvements, particularly at the chain level, such as:
Hook: Allows developers to embed post-transaction logic such as arbitrage, liquidation, and accounting directly into the chain.
Huge Transactions: Supports larger transaction sizes, allowing cross-program calls.
Cross-Chain Calls: Achieve atomic operations across chains through built-in system programs.
Built-in OAuth Support: Allows users to use OAuth services like Google, X, or Reddit as wallets.
Here we emphasize Hooks, which allow developers to embed logic such as arbitrage, liquidation, and accounting directly into the chain. Solayer Chain also sets an incentive and fee model for hooks. The execution of Hooks adopts a bidding model similar to a Dutch auction. Developers or users who want to attach a Hook to a specific program need to bid (bidding for the right to execute the hook in the next epoch, one epoch at a time), where the bidding price determines whether the Hook can be executed and its priority. The top 16 highest bidders win.
Each time a Hook is executed, its bidding amount will be allocated as follows:
40% allocated to the transaction initiator.
40% allocated to the program owner, incentivizing them to develop and maintain high-quality programs.
20% allocated to the network to offset additional on-chain computation overhead.
As mentioned above, the model that allocates bidding fees to transaction initiators and program owners will encourage more developers and users to participate in the use of Hooks. This not only enhances the platform's functionality but also increases network activity. Through this, Solayer Chain can effectively prevent spam transactions or off-chain malicious MEV exploitation, providing an additional layer of protection for the network.
The vision of Solayer Chain is not only to enhance performance but also to integrate more user experience and developer-friendly features into blockchain technology.
