Source of the article: Foresight News

Author: KarenZ, Foresight News

This week, Solayer, a re-staking project in the Solana ecosystem, unveiled its roadmap for 2025, with the core highlight being the upcoming hardware-accelerated SVM blockchain - 'Solayer InfiniSVM.' For Solayer, 'Solayer InfiniSVM' is undoubtedly an important part of realizing its long-term vision.

Chaofan Shou, the chief engineer of Solayer, joined the Solayer team after abandoning his PhD studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He revealed that the team drew considerable inspiration from the Solana validator client Firedancer during development and decided to offload most of Solana's components to SmartNICs and programmable switches. This approach significantly 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 made up of hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, which clean and pre-execute transactions based on probabilistic predictions of future states. Subsequently, all execution snapshots are sent to a sorter built with Intel Tofino switches and additional FPGAs. Notably, most transactions are already confirmed as valid during the pre-execution phase, so they do not need to be executed again on the sorter. For the remaining conflicting transactions, the sorter of Solayer Chain will re-execute them using a state-of-the-art scheduling algorithm based on the fine-grained account access patterns collected during pre-execution to ensure fairness and efficiency of the transactions.

In terms of performance, Chaofan Shou stated that for simple workloads, Solayer Chain can achieve over 16 billion transactions per second (TPS); for workloads with conflicts, it can reach a level of 890,000 TPS. This means that on Solayer Chain, billions of USDC transfer requests and millions of users trading the same memecoin on Raydium can be processed every second.

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 states that, through connections with SDN (Software Defined Networking) and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), it can achieve 100 Gbps 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 ingress: Each transaction enters an initial entry point as shown in the top left of the diagram, which performs signature verification (sigverify) and local deduplication (to avoid duplicate transactions);

2. Pre-execution phase: Verified transactions are then sent to the pre-execution cluster for pre-execution.

3. Sorting and scheduling: Transaction results and intermediate snapshots are sent to the sorter via InfiniBand (providing 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 transactions take the simple path or the complex path.

Simple path: If all accounts are at the latest version during pre-execution, state changes will be directly applied via RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), using local cache on 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 fair and optimal parallel execution of all transactions.

4. State updates: The state changes of executed transactions will be updated in the sharded database. The sharded database utilizes the RDMA protocol for efficient cross-node data access.

5. Transaction broadcasting: After the transaction is executed and the state changes are written, the transaction is broadcasted through global PoPs (Points of Presence).

In terms of consensus mechanism, Solayer Chain adopts a hybrid consensus protocol of Proof-of-Authority-and-Stake, batching transactions into shreds, each shred containing a slot number, a transaction vector, metadata of accessed account versions, and a linking hash. Trusted entities act as sorters and publish shreds, while validators stake and vote to decide whether the shreds can be accepted.

It is worth mentioning that Solayer Chain not only focuses on performance but also introduces several user experience improvements, especially chain-level support, such as:

  • Hook: Allows developers to directly embed post-transaction logic such as arbitrage, liquidation, and accounting into the chain.

  • Large 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, Hooks are emphasized; hooks allow developers to directly embed logic such as arbitrage, liquidation, and accounting into the chain. Additionally, Solayer Chain has set up an incentive and fee model for hooks. The execution of Hooks adopts a bidding model similar to Dutch auctions. Developers or users who wish to attach a Hook to a specific program must bid (bidding for the right to execute the hook in the next epoch, one epoch at a time), and the bid price determines whether the Hook can be executed and the priority of execution. The top 16 highest bidders win.

Each time a Hook is executed, its bidding amount will be distributed according to the following ratio:

  • 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 costs.

The model above allocates bidding fees to transaction initiators and program owners, incentivizing more developers and users to participate in the use of Hooks. This not only enhances the platform's functionality but also increases the network's activity. Through this, Solayer Chain can effectively prevent junk transactions or malicious MEV exploitation off-chain, providing an additional layer of protection for the network.

The vision of Solayer Chain is not only to enhance performance but also to incorporate more user experience and developer-friendly features into blockchain technology.