Overview of the SVM Track: MoveVM Implementation, How Far Can SVM Go?

Original title: (Overview of SVM Track: MoveVM Implementation, How Far Can SVM Go?)

Original author: jk, Odaily Planet Daily

As the demand for high performance and scalability becomes increasingly urgent, the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) is gradually becoming an important part of promoting the development of decentralized ecosystems. By combining Solana's speed with Ethereum's ecological advantages, innovative projects based on SVM are creating new experiences for developers and users, breaking through the performance bottlenecks of traditional blockchain architecture.

Not long ago, the launch of Move sparked considerable expectations for the virtual machine track. Following MoveVM, the next hot topic for virtual machines is SVM.

This article will delve into three representative SVM projects: Sonic SVM, SOON, and Eclipse. They share similarities in technical details but also have significant differences. Odaily Planet Daily has compiled public information about these three projects and provided interpretations. Let's start with the first project—Sonic, which just had its TGE.

Sonic SVM: An SVM for games, which may become the cradle of the next 'Jumping Sheep.'

According to the official website, Sonic SVM is the first atomized SVM chain, designed to support the sovereign game economy on Solana for aggregation and settlement.

Sonic SVM is built on HyperGrid, the first concurrent scaling framework on Solana, and Sonic is the first Grid instance managed by this framework. Specifically, both HyperGrid and Sonic SVM come from the team behind Sonic (formerly Mirror World), meaning that the team itself has built both the framework and the product, similar to the relationship between Virtuals and Luna.

The design intention of HyperGrid is to achieve high customization and scalability while maintaining composability with Solana. According to the developer documentation, applications supported by HyperGrid can be written on EVM but ultimately executed on Solana, with the final settlement layer being Solana, facilitating the adaptation of EVM ecosystem applications to Solana. This differs from the direction of MoveVM technology with Ethereum as the final settlement layer.

At the same time, it is important to note that Sonic SVM and the similarly named project Sonic (developed by the Fantom team) are completely different projects, and readers should be aware of the distinction between the projects and assets.

The team's vision is: The birth of Sonic is to unlock new experiences for developers and players. 'We designed Sonic to create an incubation ground for high-performance decentralized games, contrasting sharply with traditional in-game asset trading experiences.'

On the official website, the advantages of Sonic SVM mainly come from:

· Ultra-fast low cost: Sonic provides an ultra-fast on-chain gaming experience for players on all game-specific L1 chains through SVM technology.

· Atomic interoperability: Execute transactions on Sonic without redeploying Solana programs and accounts. Directly leverage the advantages brought by Solana's underlying services and liquidity.

· Write for EVM, execute on SVM: Use HyperGrid's interpreter to seamlessly deploy dApps from EVM chains to Solana.

· Composable game primitives and sandbox environment: Sonic is based on an on-chain ECS framework, providing native composable game primitives and scalable data types. Developers can use game engine sandbox tools to build business logic on-chain.

· Profit infrastructure: Sonic natively supports the growth, traffic, payment, and settlement infrastructure for games, empowering developers.

In terms of investors, Sonic is led by Bitkraft, with the following total investor lineup:

Source: Sonic SVM Official Website

Addressing problems and solutions

As an infrastructure for games, Sonic SVM specifically addresses the underlying performance pressure for game operation on Solana. The team's own statement on this issue is:

From 2022 to 2023, the number of wallet accounts grew from 100,000 to 1,000,000, with expectations to exceed 5 million by 2024, and it is hoped to reach 50 million in the coming years. However, alongside user growth is an explosive growth in dApp and DeFi activities. Daily transaction volumes have surged from 4 million in 2022 to 200 million in 2024, conservatively estimated to exceed 4 billion by 2026, and potentially reach hundreds of billions.

This growth trend has put tremendous performance pressure on Solana. Currently, its blockchain operates under conditions of 2500-4000 TPS, with latency fluctuations between 6 to 80 seconds, mostly maintaining around 40 seconds. When TPS exceeds 4000, the transaction success rate drops to 70%-85%. As TPS could potentially reach tens of thousands in the future, the performance bottleneck issue will become even more prominent.

The situation is especially severe in gaming scenarios. Full-chain games (FOCG) and high-concurrency small games, as well as single large games, may cause sudden transaction peaks during special operational activities. This pressure not only affects the performance of the Solana main chain but also directly impacts the playability of the games and user experience. For the gaming industry, a poor user experience can be a fatal challenge.

To address these issues, Sonic's innovative design primarily targets high concurrency and instantaneous transaction demands in gaming scenarios, providing developers and players with a smooth and efficient on-chain experience.

Sonic x TikTok: What sparks will emerge from large-scale Web2 applications?

SonicX is Sonic's first TikTok Mini App and serves as Sonic's gaming platform on TikTok. TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users, and what Sonic aims to do is select users who can directly enter the Web3 gaming world from this pool, a process very similar to Telegram.

So, how does Sonic specifically operate? First, users must have a real TikTok account instead of a Douyin account to log in, which directly bypasses countries and regions where TikTok is unavailable. Subsequently, this part of KYC-verified users can complete games and tasks through SonicX, interacting with the underlying facilities of Sonic SVM. Overall, the design of SonicX is not fundamentally different from most TG mini-programs we encounter, but since the user base comes directly from TikTok, it saves the need for KYC while ensuring that most users are real.

Source: SonicX

So, a natural question arises: if most users come from the TikTok Web2 platform, do they still need to relearn Web3 knowledge to enter SonicX? How do they understand what a wallet is? What is a private key? This is precisely what SonicX needs to learn most. In SonicX, most operations are completely abstracted, and users hardly realize that a wallet exists, except when they really need to transfer tokens to a third-party wallet. From Sonic's own Tap-to-Earn, to completing related tasks, to other games in the game center, SonicX automatically generates a wallet strongly bound to the user's TikTok account without requiring any Web3 expertise to interact with the wallet. Users can even see that the wallet's avatar is imported from TikTok. In other words, theoretically, this infrastructure can support complete account abstraction, and users do not need to understand the crypto industry until they need to 'sell the account' or transfer game tokens out for trading on exchanges.

Sonic stated in its blog: 'TikTok's popularity among KYC-verified users provides us with unique insights into user preferences, creating a strong environment conducive to attracting attention to Sonic games. Through a carefully designed user flow, we pave a convenient path for new Web3 players to explore and enjoy blockchain games, seamlessly integrating with their existing TikTok experience.'

Through simple login, incentivizing on-chain operations to earn rewards, along with a user-friendly guided process, SonicX has the potential to form traffic through TikTok. If there is any disadvantage, it is that SonicX itself and the settings of other games are still relatively simple and do not have particularly eye-catching mechanisms and gameplay like popular mini-programs. However, infrastructure is always the first step for games to emerge, and directing traffic through a Web2 platform remains the most likely prerequisite for the success of Web3 games.

This is also the direction where Sonic SVM has the most unique advantages. Imagine being a developer who has developed a mobile game and can seamlessly deploy it to Solana on the backend and to TikTok on the frontend. If a video about this game goes viral, users can directly click through the official account to enter the game without needing to register a wallet, but the in-game tokens are real on-chain tokens. So, could we see the next on-chain version of a mini-program like Jumping Sheep or Jumping Sheep? Could this be the mechanism for breaking through Web3 gaming?

These are all easily foreseeable problems. Unexpectedly, they actually created a 'Jumping Sheep.'

At the end of October 2024, Sonic SVM announced a strategic partnership with Mahjong Verse. Mahjong Verse, formerly Mahjong Meta, is a well-established project in the Web3 gaming sector, supported by top investors such as Dragonfly and Folius. They have created a 'Jumping Sheep' replica game on the TikTok side of Sonic SVM, where the mechanism has changed to eliminate when three Mahjong tiles are collected. In other aspects, the levels are similar to 'Jumping Sheep,' with layers of Mahjong tiles that require strong thinking ability and a bit of luck to clear.

This Mahjong-themed game is also the first game on Sonic Applayer, currently found in Sonic X's Game Center. In Sonic's promotional materials, it states, 'Integrating Mahjong Verse into our ecosystem not only showcases how our infrastructure supports complex gaming experiences but also retains the ease of use expected by TikTok users.' This indicates the future vision of Sonic Applayer.

In summary, Sonic SVM focuses on the underlying infrastructure for games, with a clear application example already existing in TikTok Applayer. It has now reached the token issuance stage, and we look forward to seeing what kind of game will be released through Sonic SVM next, and whether it can break through the market via TikTok as a traffic entry point.

Timeline

In June, Sonic announced the completion of a $12 million Series A financing round led by Bitkraft Ventures, with participation from Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, and others, reportedly achieving a fully diluted token valuation of $100 million in this round. Sonic's legal entity, Mirror World Labs, has built a proprietary technology named HyperGrid Framework, capable of achieving horizontal scalability through Solana chain rollups.

In September, Odaily reported that Sonic SVM recently announced the sales information for HyperFuse Guardian Nodes, reportedly the first node sale in the Solana ecosystem.

The official announcement states that HyperFuse Guardian Nodes are an indispensable part of the security and functionality of the Sonic Hypergrid framework in the SVM ecosystem. Node operators will help validate state transitions and improve network efficiency. Early adopters have the opportunity to purchase Sonic tokens at prices lower than those offered to VCs during Sonic's $12 million Series A financing round. This node sale is a key component of Sonic's plan to develop the SVM ecosystem and the Solana gaming track. The company also revealed that it has partnered with over 40 game studios, with more than 2 million active wallets on its platform.

At the end of December, Sonic SVM announced it would airdrop SONIC tokens to all users who join its games on the Solana blockchain, with snapshots yet to be taken, and the airdrop will occur in January.

At the same time, Sonic SVM announced its native token $SONIC tokenomics, with a total supply of 2.4 billion tokens, of which 57% is allocated to the community, including community and ecosystem development (30%), initial claims (7%), and HyperGrid rewards (20%).

Tokenomics of Sonic SVM. Source: X

On January 3, Sonic SVM announced on the X platform that the initial claim for SONIC will soon open, aiming to reward supporters and contributors. The SONIC eligibility checker is already online, allowing users to check their eligibility for the initial claim.

On January 7, Sonic SVM will officially have its TGE, with confirmed exchanges including OKX, Upbit, Bybit, KuCoin, Backpack, and others.

SOON: A project with no VC involvement, the strongest execution layer on Ethereum.

Over 30K TPS, Source: SOON Official Website

SOON's product is called Super Adoption Stack, which includes SOON Stack and the SOON mainnet.

SOON Stack is a Rollup framework based on OP Stack and unique Decoupled SVM, aimed at achieving maximum performance and supporting the deployment and operation of SVM Layer 2 on any underlying Layer 1. Chains deployed through SOON Stack are referred to as SOON chains. Currently, SOON Stack supports Ethereum as the settlement layer, Avail as the data availability (DA) layer, and integrates support from Caldera and Altlayer.

The SOON mainnet utilizes the SOON Stack to deploy the SOON chain on Ethereum, aiming to become the most performant L2 on Ethereum.

InterSOON is a cross-chain messaging protocol designed to ensure smooth interaction between networks. It enables interoperability between the SOON mainnet, SOON Stack (SOON chain), and other Layer 1 blockchains, connecting all networks through a seamless interface. The underlying cross-chain messaging of InterSOON is supported by Hyperlane.

The core advantages of SOON

Currently, many projects themed around scalability are based on SVM, but the uniqueness of SOON lies in its design as an optimal SVM Rollup framework for efficient performance. By decoupling SVM and its TPU (Transaction Processing Unit), SOON achieves meaningful performance enhancement and efficiency maximization.

Why does SOON choose decoupling instead of Forked SVM?

Limitations of Forked SVM:

· Waste of default architecture: Many projects using SVM outside Solana L1 are Forked SVM. This approach directly adopts the existing Solana client, adjusting only some parameters without modifying key TPU or TVU (Transaction Verification Unit).

· Waste of data availability: The biggest issue with Forked SVM is the inefficiency of blobspace utilization in the data availability (DA) layer. For example, even if there is only one 'sorting node,' each block will still generate voting transactions, consuming a lot of resources.

SOON adopts a customized decoupled SVM, optimizing transaction processing efficiency and DA usage by removing voting transactions and peer-to-peer network overhead. Particularly in the absence of L1 consensus mechanisms (such as Proof of History and Leader Schedule), the decoupled SVM can be optimized more flexibly.

Key benefits of decoupling:

· Support for Fraud Proofs: The decoupled SVM provides native support for fraud proofs, which are crucial for L2 network security. Fraud proofs ensure the security of L2 states by verifying user transactions from L1 deposits (export pipeline) and L2 sorting nodes.

· Enhance performance and security: By optimizing transaction processing and DA usage, SOON Stack significantly reduces resource waste while enhancing network security, meeting the demands of Web3 applications for high throughput and security.

The SOON team provides a detailed analysis of decoupled SVM in this blog post, which interested readers can refer to. (The original text is in English.)

The mission and vision of SOON

SOON Stack aims to achieve the following goals:

· Provide high-performance Rollup solutions in any L1 ecosystem.

· Reduce transaction costs by 10 times.

· Promote the widespread adoption of SVM.

· Unlock innovative application scenarios across ecosystems.

Addressing the question: Why is there a need for higher-performance Rollup and tech stack?

The issues that the SOON team addresses are quite different from those of Sonic SVM. The technical stack provided by SOON will eventually settle on the Ethereum main chain, targeting the performance inadequacies of the Ethereum main chain. So, what problems do they plan to address? The following content is extracted and summarized from SOON's blog:

· Single-thread bottlenecks limit scalability: Most current Rollup frameworks still use single-threaded operating environments, leading to inefficient processing and easy congestion and high transaction fees during high demand periods, severely restricting the scalability potential of decentralized applications.

· The gap in developer ecosystems: There is a significant gap in the quality of dApps and developer capabilities between the EVM ecosystem and SVM. The SVM ecosystem attracts more high-level developers, who create high-quality products like Jupiter through stronger engineering culture and tool support.

· Fragmentation of liquidity in EVM: The multi-chain phenomenon in the EVM ecosystem leads developers to repeatedly deploy the same products, resulting in degraded product quality and insufficient user attraction, while the Solana ecosystem centralizes resources through a unified environment, significantly enhancing product and community experience.

· Ethereum fee market issues: Ethereum's global fee market mechanism causes high-demand transactions (such as NFTs) to drive up the transaction fees for all, limiting the economic viability of daily transactions. The localized fee market of SVM addresses this issue by independently calculating fees to avoid unrelated transactions impacting each other.

· The complexity of zk-VM: Although zk-VM technology has potential in privacy and scalability, its high development threshold and operational costs hinder its popularization, making large-scale application difficult in the short term.

· The advantages of Rust can assist SVM: SVM uses Rust as its smart contract language, providing a higher performance and safer development environment, addressing issues such as memory safety and concurrency processing compared to Solidity, making it more suitable for high-performance blockchain application development.

· Parallel processing enhances network performance: EVM's sequential processing limits network throughput, while SVM achieves simultaneous processing of multiple transactions through parallel processing technology, greatly enhancing network performance and ensuring rapid response and low costs even during high-demand periods.

In other words, strictly speaking, Sonic SVM and SOON are only in the same SVM track, and they are not competitors. Sonic SVM targets the performance limitations of Solana, with the final settlement layer being Solana; while SOON will build L2 on top of Ethereum, addressing Ethereum's performance bottlenecks.

Ecological applications on SOON

We removed all the infrastructure applications to see what interesting toC applications exist on SOON. The biggest direction is in the DeFi sector;

The SOON official website showcases six applications in the DeFi direction, most of which should be native DeFi applications. There aren't many followers on the X platform, but the functions can meet most needs in the DeFi direction, including Portal Finance (lending protocol), Raptor (AMM), Alita (native DEX), and Sponge (staking). The other two are projects with a certain level of attention, respectively.

EnzoFi, a cross-chain liquidity management center, offers products including lending, bridges, staking, and earning, and has its own points system. It is already live on Solana, Sui, Eclipse, SOON, and Movement, with 163K followers on the X platform.

Blendy, an interesting project: This is a project dedicated to providing monetary market services with meme coins and AI agent-related assets, where all collateral is meme coins, aligning perfectly with current trends. It is still in the testnet phase, and the project has announced on Twitter that transaction numbers have exceeded 150,000.

In terms of other applications that users can directly experience, there are four more interesting applications on SOON:

· Aeronyx: Aeronyx is a DePIN protocol based on SOON, connecting millions of devices and tokenizing computational resources to promote the widespread application of distributed computing.

· Gigentic: Gigentic is a collaboration platform based on SOON, where AI agents can collaborate and earn through on-chain mechanisms, building a bridge for interaction between humans and AI.

· CoindPay: CoindPay is a multifunctional payment and DeFi application supporting cross-industry payment scenarios based on SOON, providing users with efficient payment solutions.

· Polyquest: Polyquest is a decentralized prediction market where users can predict events on the SOON platform, exploring new models of prediction economy based on blockchain.

Timeline:

On August 27, The Block reported that the Solana Optimistic Network (SOON) completed a co-builder financing round, with participation from Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Coinbase Ventures director Jonathan King, Celestia Labs co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam, Avail co-founder Robinson Burkey, and Wormhole Foundation co-founder Robinson Burkey, although the specific amount of financing has not been disclosed.

SOON co-builder round, Source: SOON

This round of financing is specifically targeted at co-builders, and no venture capital firms participated. This means that no VC funds entered SOON's total financing.

On November 8, SOON officially launched the public testnet, with performance benchmarks of 30,000 TPS and a block time of 50 milliseconds. SOON recommends that all Genesis hackathon participants migrate their projects to the new public testnet.

On January 3, SOON announced that the Alpha mainnet is now online and released the SOON token economic model. The initial total supply of SOON is 1 billion tokens (3% annual inflation), with 51% allocated to the community, distributed through a fair launch. Additionally, 25% is allocated for ecosystem development, 8% for airdrops and liquidity, 6% for the foundation/treasury, and 10% for the team and co-builders.

SOON Tokenomics, Source: SOON

SOON stated in the blog published on the Alpha mainnet:

$SOON token allocation adopts a fair launch model: there are no pre-mined tokens, no prior distribution to teams or private investors, and venture capital firms have no special rights or opportunities. This allocation method is similar to the infrastructure token issuance of the ICO era in 2017, such as Solana, Polkadot, and Avalanche. Everyone can participate in the investment at the same time, and the majority of tokens will be allocated to builders and the community. More details will be announced next week, so stay tuned!

Eclipse: The earliest launched SVM, but no tokens have been issued.

Eclipse is a competitor to SOON, also launched as an SVM L2 on Ethereum. From the official website, Eclipse is a research-heavy, ecosystem-focused L2 that is stylishly designed. In terms of progress, Eclipse is not lagging behind the two aforementioned competitors; the mainnet has actually been launched, but no tokens have been issued. Strategically, it is unique, positioning itself closer to the Ethereum ecosystem to achieve a pure 'experience Solana's speed on Ethereum.'

Eclipse's introduction states that

Eclipse is the first Layer 2 based on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) on Ethereum, combining Solana's high speed with Ethereum's liquidity. This innovative architecture provides users with a high-performance L2 solution that leverages the rich liquidity of the Ethereum ecosystem while maintaining strict verifiability constraints. Through this design, Eclipse achieves a balance between performance and security, providing strong technical support for decentralized applications.

Eclipse uses Celestia as its DA.

A very obvious difference is that Eclipse has not issued its own token, instead using Ethereum as the gas token for the entire L2, effectively tying itself tightly to Ethereum's 'chariot.' At the same time, Eclipse has issued re-staked Ethereum tokens to drive L2.

Turbo ETH (tETH) is a unified re-staked token (URT) launched in collaboration between Eclipse and Nucleus, designed to consolidate the highest-yield protocols on Ethereum into a simple and user-friendly default yield token. tETH provides users with a convenient way to earn re-staking rewards while eliminating liquidity fragmentation and complex operations.

Users can mint tETH by depositing five types of liquidity-restaking tokens (LRT), including WETH, weETH, ezETH, rswETH, apxETH, and pufETH. The design of tETH not only diversifies risk but also maximizes user rewards through its unified yield mechanism, providing on-chain users with a new liquidity management tool.

tETH is a token with exchange rate yield, similar to Compound's cTokens and Lido's wstETH, where the ETH-based yield increases the exchange rate over time, while non-ETH rewards can be claimed through a separate interface.

As of the publication date, according to DeFiLlama data, the total TVL of the entire Eclipse chain reached $19.33 million, which is not very high. The number of followers on the X platform is 195,000.

Eclipse ecosystem

In the DeFi ecosystem aspect, the largest DEX on Eclipse is Orca, with a current TVL of $9.2 million. The lending protocol Save has a TVL of $3.55 million, while the second-largest DEX Invariant has a TVL of $3.25 million. All these figures have seen significant growth in the past month.

Next, let's take a look at consumer applications. Here are some applications on the Eclipse ecosystem that have garnered significant attention on the X platform:

· After School Club: an NFT series and also Eclipse's genesis NFT;

· SEND Arcade, a platform where you can win ETH by playing games;

· Dscvr.one, a social protocol, has around 80,000 followers on the X platform;

· HedgeHog: a prediction market also on Solana;

· AllDomains: Eclipse domain name service;

· Moonlaunch.fun: Pump.fun on Eclipse; Blobscriptions: Inscriptions on Eclipse.

Timeline:

In September 2022, Eclipse announced the completion of a $15 million Pre-Seed and seed round financing with a valuation of over $100 million. The $9 million seed round was co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, with participation from Caballeros Capital, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Soma Capital, Struck Capital, and CoinList. An additional $6 million was raised in the Pre-Seed round, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Tribe Capital, Tabiya, Galileo, Polygon Ventures, The House Fund, and Accel. Eclipse is reportedly responsible for developing customizable Rollup supply programs, aiming to become a 'universal Layer 2' platform compatible with multiple L1 blockchains.

In February 2023, Eclipse launched the SVM-based scaling solution around Solana, allowing applications to be compatible with Polygon. Through this solution, dApps built on the Solana blockchain can migrate to or become multi-chain via Polygon SVM, potentially opening doors for communities using and building on different blockchains.

In December 2023, the Eclipse testnet was made public;

In March 2024, Eclipse Labs announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round, co-led by Placeholder and Hack VC, raising a total of $65 million. This round of financing attracted participation from investors including RockTree Capital, Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, funds managed by Apollo, Fenbushi Capital, and ParaFi Capital, as well as strategic investments from Flow Traders, GSR, Auros, and OKX Ventures. Numerous researchers and developers participated in its angel round investment, including Barnabé Monnot (Ethereum Foundation), John Adler (Celestia Labs), Austin Federa (Solana Foundation), ZachXBT, and Meltem Demirors.

In May 2024, Eclipse founder and CEO Neel Somani resigned amid sexual harassment rumors, succeeded by Vijay Chetty, who was promoted from Chief Growth Officer and will assume all CEO responsibilities. Chetty has over ten years of native cryptocurrency experience, having held leadership positions at BlackRock, Uniswap Labs, dYdX Trading, and Ripple Labs.

In July 2024, the Eclipse developer mainnet was made public;

In September 2024, Eclipse announced the launch of the re-staked token tETH, supported by Nucleus.

In November, Eclipse announced that Ben Livshits joined the team as Chief Technology Officer. Ben holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and has over twenty years of research experience, having worked at Intel, Microsoft, Brave, and Matter Labs.

In the same month, Eclipse's mainnet went online.

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