The news that Sonic SVM is about to TGE is a hot spot in the crypto market. As a Solana Layer2 focusing on Web3 games, Sonic SVM launched its Tap-to-Earn game on TikTok two months ago and has attracted more than one million TikTok users.

At a time of slow growth in the Web3 gaming, Sonic SVM offers new development tools and potential opportunities for Web3 game developers and the Solana ecosystem. Beosin, as a security service provider of Sonic SVM, will analyze the architecture and technical features of Sonic SVM in this article to help general users and developers understand and participate in building the ecosystem of Sonic SVM.

"OP Stack" for Solana L2s

Since the Layer1 war in 2021, the competition between blockchains has entered into red oceans. Layer2 scaling solutions for ETH (especially ZK-Rollup and OP-Rollup) were gradually refined. OP Stack came out with the Rollup + modular design concept. Since then, projects that provide Rollup-as-a-Service have also emerged and been popular, greatly reducing the technical difficulty and cost of developing and deploying a blockchain. Thus, a large number of DApps have tended to launch their own chains.

In addition to the trend of EVM's "one-click launching chain", building projects directly on Solana has also been a popular choice of many developers over the past two years. Thanks to Solana's fast execution speed and low block space cost, more and more Dapps are choosing Solana as their infrastructure, and Solana Layer2 is also starting to appear such as Grass, an AI data project, Zeta Markets, an on-chain derivatives trading platform, and Sonic SVM.

However, building a Solana Layer2 does not have as many tools and solutions as building an ETH Layer2, such as using OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, ZK Stack, etc. To address this problem, Sonic SVM's HyperGrid framework provides developers with a Rollup solution that specifically supports SVM (Solana virtual Machine), and Sonic SVM is the first L2 developed based on HyberGrid.

The system architecture of HyperGrid is shown in the following figure. Each Grid instance is a semi-autonomous network within the HyperGrid framework, which is used to run specific applications such as games, DeFi, and AI agents.

https://docs.sonic.game/developers/hypergrid-framework/hypergrid-infrastructure/architectural-overview

The key components of Grid are as follows:


● A ZK co-processor for managing Grid specific operations for state synchronization with HyperGrid Shared State Network (HSSN)


● BlockStore for processing account and program data


● Runtime (Sonic SVM Runtime and Sonic EVM Runtime for running Solana programs and Solidity smart contracts)


● Concurrent Merkle tree generator for fast proof generation and state transitions

It is important to note that the HyperGrid Shared State Network (HSSN) is a key part of HyperGrid, which acts as the consensus layer of the entire network. The HSSN is responsible for state management of all grids and communication between Gird-Grid, Grid-HSSN, and HSSN-Solana.

In addition to handling network communications, the HSSN regularly synchronizes block data from the Grid Rollups to Solana, and the reliability of transactions in the block is maintained by HyperFuse Guardian Nodes, who are key observers and validators in the HyperGrid ecosystem.

In September 2024, Beosin completed a security audit of HyperFuse Guardian Nodes covering multiple aspects, including program vulnerabilities, security vulnerabilities, and potential attack vectors that could compromise the integrity and reliability of the Sonic SVM network.

https://beosin.com/audits/HyperFuse_Guardian_Nodes_202409111918.pdf

The features of HyperGrid can be summarized as follows:


1. 
Shared Sequencer Network: Each Grid in HyberGrid operates semi-autonomously, sharing the sequencer network, and the HSSN handles the communication between the grids to improve interoperability.


2. 
Support EVM and SVM: As can be seen from the above architecture, Grid supports EVM. Developers can deploy EVM ecosystem applications to HyperGrid networks through the HyperGrid Interpreter tool provided by Sonic SVM.


3. 
High Scalability: Due to the design of HSSN, HyperGrid can be scaled by adding multiple grids according to business needs to increase the transaction throughput of the entire network.

Optimized for Web3 games: Rush ECS framework

In game development, developers often use game engines to create games in order to reduce the complexity and difficulty of development. Web3 games involve blockchain technology, and developers who want to develop fully on-chain games need to first learn a large number of blockchain-related technology stacks. The Sonic SVM team wants to make it easier for developers to build Web3 games by abstracting some of the components and processes involved in Web3 game development.

Introduction | Sonic | Official Documentation

Currently, the ECS framework abstracts seven subatomics: World (on-chain data used to track the state of a game world instance), Entities (data structure used to represent a particular Gaming Primitive), Components (the data that an Entity holds), Systems (systems that process input and generate state transitions), Instances (instances of Entities), Blueprints (used to define the structure of a game world), and Gaming Primitives (definition of on-chain entities).

Sonic SVM provides these components and allows developers to combine and extend them, which allows developers to build Web3 games quickly and easily. The Rush ECS framework is still under heavy development and is not yet available in a stable release.

On January 7, Sonic SVM will perform a TGE to empower and motivate ecosystem participants and developers with $SONIC tokens and maintain HyperGrid network security and governance. In December 2024, Beosin completed an audit of the $veSONIC token to provide security for Sonic SVM's subsequent network operations and voting governance.

Summary

Sonic SVM provides a high-performance infrastructure and a new game development framework to allow developers to build higher-performance applications, especially Web3 game applications which can quickly settle on Solana mainnet. The HyperGrid Interpreter helps EVM developers and projects quickly migrate to the HyperGrid ecosystem. Sonic SVM has the opportunity to become the new infrastructure for Web3 games, DeFi, payments and other applications in the future. It helps developers achieve higher revenue by building different kinds of applications, while improving user experience and interaction interest.