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 driving 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 the performance bottlenecks of traditional blockchain architectures.
Not long ago, the launch of Move gave us significant expectations for the virtual machine track. Following MoveVM, the next hot topic in virtual machines is SVM.
This article will delve into three representative SVM projects—Sonic SVM, SOON, and Eclipse—highlighting their technical similarities as well as significant differences. Odaily Planet Daily has compiled and interpreted the publicly available information on these three projects, starting with the first project—Sonic, which has just TGE.
Sonic SVM: an SVM for games, likely to be the cradle of the next 'Yin Le Ge Yang'
According to the official website, Sonic SVM is the first atomic SVM chain designed to support the sovereign game economy on Solana for aggregation and settlement.
Sonic SVM is built on top of Solana's first concurrent scaling framework HyperGrid. Sonic is the first Grid instance managed by this framework. Specifically, HyperGrid and Sonic SVM both come from the team behind Sonic (formerly Mirror World), meaning the team itself 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 native composability with Solana. According to the developer documentation, applications supported by HyperGrid can be written in EVM but ultimately executed on Solana, with Solana as the final settlement layer, beneficial for bringing EVM ecosystem applications to Solana. This is different from the direction of MoveVM technology, which has Ethereum as its final settlement layer.
Another important point to note is that Sonic SVM and the similarly named project Sonic (developed by the Fantom team) are completely different projects, and readers need to be aware of the differences between projects and assets.
The team's vision is: the birth of Sonic is to unlock a new experience for developers and players. 'We designed Sonic to create an incubation ground for high-performance decentralized games, in stark contrast to 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 in all games on dedicated L1 chains through SVM technology.
Atomic interoperability: Executing transactions on Sonic does not require redeploying Solana programs and accounts, directly leveraging the advantages of Solana's base services and liquidity.
Written for EVM, executed on SVM: Seamlessly deploy dApps from EVM chains to Solana through HyperGrid's interpreter.
Composable gaming primitives and sandbox environment: Sonic provides native composable gaming primitives and extensible data types based on an on-chain ECS framework. Developers can use game engine sandbox tools to build business logic on-chain.
Profitable infrastructure: Sonic natively supports growth, traffic, payment, and settlement infrastructure for games, empowering developers.
In terms of investors, Sonic is led by Bitkraft, and the full investor roster is as follows:
Source: Sonic SVM official website
Addressing problems and solutions
As an infrastructure for games, Sonic SVM specifically addresses the underlying performance pressure of games running on Solana. The team itself describes this issue as follows:
From 2022 to 2023, the number of wallet accounts grew from 100,000 to 1 million, and it is expected to exceed 5 million in 2024, potentially reaching 50 million in the following years. However, in line with user growth, there has been explosive growth in dApp and DeFi activities. Daily transaction volume increased from 4 million transactions in 2022 to 200 million in 2024, conservatively estimated to exceed 4 billion by 2026, and may even reach hundreds of billions of transactions.
This growth trend puts tremendous performance pressure on Solana. Currently, its blockchain operates under conditions of 2,500-4,000 TPS, with latency fluctuations between 6 and 80 seconds, mostly maintaining around 40 seconds. When TPS exceeds 4,000, the transaction success rate drops to 70%-85%. As future TPS could reach tens of thousands, performance bottleneck issues will become increasingly prominent.
The situation is particularly severe in gaming scenarios. Full-chain games (FOCG) and high-concurrency small games and single large games may cause instantaneous 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, poor user experience can be a fatal challenge.
To address these issues, Sonic's innovative design mainly targets the 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 the large-scale application of Web2 create?
SonicX is the first TikTok Mini App of Sonic and serves as Sonic's gaming platform on Tiktok. TikTok has over 1 billion monthly active users, and what Sonic aims to do is to pick out users who can directly enter the Web3 gaming world from this pool, a process that will be very similar to Telegram.
So how does Sonic specifically do this? First, users must have a real Tiktok account and not a Douyin account to log in, which will directly bypass countries and regions where Tiktok is not available. Then, these 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 can see, but because 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 Tiktok, a Web2 platform, do they need to relearn Web3 knowledge to enter SonicX? How do they know what a wallet is? What is a private key? This is precisely what SonicX needs to learn the most. Most operations within SonicX are completely abstracted, and users hardly realize that a wallet exists, except when they actually 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 professional Web3 knowledge to interact with the wallet. Users can even see that the wallet avatar has been 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 their account' or transfer game tokens to an exchange for sale.
Sonic itself stated in its blog: 'The popularity of Tiktok in KYC verification among users provides us with unique insights into user preferences, creating a strong environment for Sonic games to gain attention. Through a carefully designed user process, 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 user-friendly guidance processes, SonicX has the potential to create traffic through Tiktok. If there is any disadvantage, it is that SonicX itself and the settings of other games are still relatively simple, lacking particularly eye-catching mechanisms and gameplay like those of popular mini-programs. However, infrastructure is always the first step for games to emerge, and using a Web2 channel for traffic remains the most likely prerequisite for the success of Web3 games.
This is also the direction where Sonic SVM currently has the most unique advantages. Imagine that after developing a mobile game as a developer, you 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 into the game through the official account without needing to register a wallet, but the tokens in the game are real on-chain tokens. So, could a next-generation on-chain version of 'Jump and Jump' or 'Yin Le Ge Yang' emerge? Would this be the mechanism for breaking the circle of Web3 games?
These are all questions that come to mind easily. What’s surprising is that they really made a game called 'Yin Le Ge Yang'.
At the end of October 2024, Sonic SVM announced a strategic partnership with Mahjong Verse. Mahjong Verse, formerly Mahjong Meta, is a veteran project in the Web3 gaming space, supported by top investors such as Dragonfly and Folius. They have created a 'Yin Le Ge Yang' replica game on the Tiktok side of Sonic SVM, with the mechanism changed to eliminate three Mahjong tiles to clear them. In other aspects, the levels and 'Yin Le Ge Yang' are similar, with layers of Mahjong tiles requiring strong thinking skills and a bit of luck to pass.
This Mahjong-themed game is also the first game on Sonic Applayer, which can now be found in the Game Center of Sonic X. In Sonic's publicity, it states, 'Integrating Mahjong Verse into our ecosystem not only showcases how our infrastructure supports complex gaming experiences but also retains the usability that TikTok users expect.' This can be seen as Sonic Applayer's future vision.
In summary, Sonic SVM focuses on underlying infrastructure for games, with clear application examples already present in the Tiktok Applayer. It has now reached the token issuance stage. We look forward to seeing what kind of game will be released through Sonic SVM next, and whether it can break through the barriers using Tiktok as a traffic entry point.
Timeline
In June, Sonic announced the completion of 12 million USD in Series A financing, led by Bitkraft Ventures, with participation from Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, etc. It is reported that the fully diluted token valuation in this round of financing reached 100 million USD. Sonic's legal entity, Mirror World Labs, has developed a proprietary technology called HyperGrid Framework, which enables horizontal scaling through Solana on-chain rollups.
In September, Odaily reported that Sonic SVM recently announced the sales information for HyperFuse Guardian Nodes, which is said to be 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 within the SVM ecosystem. Node operators will help verify state transitions and improve network efficiency. Early adopters have the opportunity to buy Sonic tokens at a price lower than that offered to VCs during Sonic's 12 million USD Series A funding 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 the platform.
At the end of December, Sonic SVM announced that it would airdrop SONIC tokens to all users who join its games on the Solana blockchain. The snapshot has not yet been 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 ecological development (30%), initial claims (7%), and HyperGrid rewards (20%).
Sonic SVM's Tokenomics. Source: X
On January 3, Sonic SVM announced on platform X that the initial claim for SONIC will soon be opened, aiming to reward supporters and contributors. Currently, the SONIC eligibility checker is also online, allowing users to check their eligibility for the initial claim.
On January 7, Sonic SVM will officially TGE, with confirmed listing exchanges including OKX, Upbit, Bybit, KuCoin, Backpack, and others.
SOON: a project without any VC involvement, the strongest execution layer on Ethereum
Over 30K TPS, source: SOON official website
The product of SOON is called Super Adoption Stack, which includes SOON Stack and the SOON mainnet.
SOON Stack is a Rollup framework based on OP Stack and a unique Decoupled SVM, aiming to achieve maximum performance and support 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 SOON Stack to deploy the SOON chain on Ethereum, aiming to become the strongest performance L2 on Ethereum.
InterSOON is a cross-chain messaging protocol designed to ensure smooth interaction between networks. It implements 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 scaling are using SVM as their foundation, but the unique aspect of SOON is that it is designed as the optimal SVM Rollup framework for efficient performance. By decoupling SVM and its TPU (Transaction Processing Unit), SOON achieves a real performance improvement and maximization of efficiency.
Why did SOON choose decoupling instead of Forked SVM?
The limitations of Forked SVM:
Waste of default architecture: Many projects using SVM outside of Solana L1 are Forked SVM. This approach directly uses the existing Solana client with only minor parameter adjustments, but without modifying critical TPU or TVU (Transaction Verification Unit).
Waste of data availability: The biggest issue with Forked SVM is the inefficient use of blobspace in the data availability (DA) layer. For instance, even with only one 'ordering node', each block still generates voting transactions, which consume significant resources.
SOON adopts a customized decoupled SVM to optimize transaction processing efficiency and DA usage by removing voting transactions and peer-to-peer network overhead. Especially in situations where L1 consensus mechanisms are not needed (such as Proof of History and Leader Schedule), the decoupled SVM can optimize more flexibly.
The key benefits of decoupling:
Supports Fraud Proofs: The decoupled SVM provides native support for fraud proofs, which are central to the security of L2 networks. Fraud proofs ensure the security of L2 state by verifying user transactions from L1 deposits (export pipeline) and L2 ordering nodes.
Enhancing performance and security: By optimizing transaction processing and DA usage, SOON Stack significantly reduces resource waste while enhancing network security, meeting the demands for high throughput and security in Web3 applications.
The SOON team provides a detailed analysis of the decoupled SVM in this blog. Interested readers can read it. (The original text is in English)
The mission and outlook of SOON
SOON Stack aims to achieve the following goals:
Provides high-performance Rollup solutions in any L1 ecosystem.
Reduces transaction costs by 10 times.
Promotes the widespread adoption of SVM.
Unlock innovative application scenarios across ecosystems.
Regarding the question: Why is there a need for higher performance Rollup and tech stack
The issues addressed by the SOON team are entirely different from those of Sonic SVM. The tech stack provided by SOON will ultimately settle on the Ethereum main chain, targeting the performance shortcomings of the Ethereum main chain. So, what problems do they plan to solve? The following content is extracted and summarized from SOON's blog:
Single-thread bottleneck limits scalability: Most current Rollup frameworks still use single-threaded runtime environments, which are inefficient and prone to network congestion and high transaction fees during high-demand periods, severely restricting the scalability potential of decentralized applications.
Gap in developer ecosystem: The quality of dApps and developer capabilities in the EVM ecosystem is significantly lower compared to SVM. The SVM ecosystem attracts more high-level developers, producing high-quality products like Jupiter through stronger engineering culture and tool support.
EVM liquidity fragmentation: The multi-chain phenomenon in the EVM ecosystem leads to developers deploying the same product repeatedly, resulting in reduced product quality and insufficient user attraction. In contrast, the Solana ecosystem concentrates resources through a unified environment, significantly enhancing product and community experience.
Ethereum fee market issues: The global fee market mechanism of Ethereum causes high-demand transactions (such as NFTs) to drive up all transaction fees, limiting the economic viability of daily transactions. The localized fee market of SVM addresses this issue by independently calculating fees to avoid unrelated transactions affecting each other.
Complexity of zk-VM: Although zk-VM technology has potential in privacy and scalability, the high development threshold and operational costs hinder its widespread adoption, making large-scale applications difficult to achieve in the short term.
The advantages of Rust can assist SVM: SVM uses Rust as the smart contract language, providing a higher performance and safer development environment. Compared to Solidity, it addresses issues of memory safety and concurrent processing, making it more suitable for high-performance blockchain application development.
Parallel processing improves network performance: EVM's sequential processing limits network throughput, while SVM achieves simultaneous processing of multiple transactions through parallel processing technology, significantly enhancing network performance and ensuring quick response and low cost even during high-demand periods.
In other words, Sonic SVM is strictly speaking not a competitor of SOON; both are in the SVM track, but Sonic SVM targets the performance limitations of Solana, with Solana as the final settlement layer; while SOON will build L2 on top of Ethereum, addressing Ethereum's performance bottleneck.
Ecological applications on SOON
We removed all basic infrastructure applications to see what interesting toC applications are available on SOON. The biggest direction is in the DeFi area;
The SOON official website showcases six DeFi application directions, most of which should be native DeFi applications. There aren’t many followers on platform X, and the functionalities can meet most of the 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, namely:
EnzoFi, a cross-chain liquidity management center, offers products including lending, bridges, staking, and earning, along with its own points system. It is now live on Solana, Sui, Eclipse, SOON, and Movement, with 163K followers on platform X.
Blendy, which is quite an interesting project: it is a project specifically designed for currency market services using meme coins and assets related to AI agents, with collateral being entirely meme coins, making it very much in line with current trends. It is still in the testnet phase, and the project has announced on Twitter that the transaction volume has already surpassed 150,000.
In terms of applications that other users can directly experience, there are also four interesting applications on SOON:
Aeronyx: Aeronyx is a DePIN protocol based on SOON that connects millions of devices and tokenizes computing resources, promoting the widespread application of distributed computing.
Gigentic: Gigentic is a collaborative platform based on SOON where AI agents can collaborate and earn through on-chain mechanisms, building a bridge for human-AI interaction.
CoindPay: CoindPay is a multifunctional payment and DeFi application that supports 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 Solana Optimistic Network (referred to as SOON) completed a co-builder round of financing, 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 co-founder of the Wormhole Foundation Robinson Burkey, among others. The specific financing amount has not yet been disclosed.
SOON co-builder round, source: SOON
This round of financing is specifically aimed at co-builders, with no venture capital firms involved. SOON has only this round of financing news, meaning that none of the funds in SOON's entire financing includes venture capital funds.
On November 8, SOON announced the official launch of the public testnet, with a performance benchmark 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, with an initial total supply of 1 billion tokens (3% inflation per year). The community allocation ratio is 51%, distributed through a fair launch. Additionally, the ecosystem allocation accounts for 25%, airdrop and liquidity allocation for 8%, foundation/treasury allocation for 6%, and team and co-builder allocation for 10%.
SOON Tokenomics, source: SOON
SOON wrote in the blog released on the Alpha mainnet:
$SOON token distribution adopts a fair launch model: no pre-mined tokens, no pre-allocation to the team or private investors, and venture capital firms have no special rights or opportunities. This distribution method is similar to the infrastructure token issuance during the ICO era of 2017, such as Solana, Polkadot, and Avalanche. Everyone can participate in the investment at the same time, and the vast majority of tokens will be allocated to builders and the community. More details will be announced next week, stay tuned!
Eclipse: the first SVM to go live, but has not issued tokens
Eclipse is a competitor of SOON, also launched as an SVM L2 on Ethereum. From the official website, Eclipse is a research-heavy and ecosystem-focused L2, with a very stylish design. In terms of stages, Eclipse is not lagging behind the two aforementioned competitors, as the mainnet has indeed been launched but has not issued tokens, strategically standing out and positioning itself closer to the Ethereum ecosystem to achieve a pure 'experience Solana's speed on Ethereum.'
The introduction of Eclipse states that,
Eclipse is the first Layer 2 based on 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 stringent verifiability constraints. Through this design, Eclipse achieves a balance between performance and security, providing strong technical support for decentralized applications.
Eclipse uses Celestia as DA.
A very obvious difference is that Eclipse has not issued its own tokens but uses Ethereum as the entire L2's gas token, effectively tying itself firmly to Ethereum's chariot. At the same time, Eclipse issued re-staked Ethereum tokens to drive L2.
Turbo ETH (tETH) is a unified re-staking token (URT) launched by Eclipse in collaboration with Nucleus, designed to integrate the highest-yielding protocols on Ethereum into a simple and easy-to-use 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 re-staked 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, bringing a new liquidity management tool to on-chain users.
tETH is a token with exchange rate yield, similar to Compound's cTokens and Lido's wstETH, where the ETH-based yield improves the exchange rate over time, while non-ETH rewards can be claimed through a separate interface.
As of the date of publication, according to DeFiIlama data, the total value locked (TVL) of the entire Eclipse chain reached 19.33 million USD, which is not very high. The number of followers on platform X is 195,000.
Eclipse Ecosystem
In the DeFi ecosystem, the largest DEX on Eclipse is Orca, with a current TVL of 9.2 million USD. The TVL of the lending protocol Save is 3.55 million USD, and the TVL of the second largest DEX Invariant is 3.25 million USD. These data have seen significant growth in the past month.
Let's take a look at consumer applications. Here are the applications with a relatively high number of followers on the X platform within the Eclipse ecosystem:
After School Club: an NFT series, also the genesis NFT of Eclipse;
SEND Arcade, a platform where you can earn ETH by playing games;
Dscvr.one, a social protocol, with about 80,000 followers on platform X;
HedgeHog: a prediction market also on Solana;
AllDomains: Eclipse domain service;
Moonlaunch.fun: Pump.fun on Eclipse;
Blobscriptions: Inscriptions on Eclipse.
Timeline:
In September 2022, Eclipse announced the completion of a Pre-Seed and Seed round financing of 15 million USD with a valuation exceeding 1 billion USD. The 9 million USD seed round financing was co-led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, with participation from Caballeros Capital, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Soma Capital, Struck Capital, and CoinList; another 6 million USD was for Pre-Seed financing, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Tribe Capital, Tabiya, Galileo, Polygon Ventures, The House Fund, and Accel. It is reported that Eclipse is 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 scaling solution around Solana, allowing applications to be compatible with Polygon. Through this solution, dApps built on the Solana blockchain can migrate or become multi-chain through Polygon SVM, opening doors for communities using and building on different blockchains.
In December 2023, the Eclipse testnet will be made public;
In March 2024, Eclipse Labs announced the completion of 50 million USD in Series A financing, led by Placeholder and Hack VC, with a total financing amount reaching 65 million USD. This round of financing also attracted the participation of investors such as RockTree Capital, Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, funds managed by Apollo, Fenbushi Capital, ParaFi Capital, and 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, Neel Somani, founder and CEO of Eclipse, resigned amid sexual harassment allegations, with Vijay Chetty taking over. Chetty was promoted from Chief Growth Officer and will assume all responsibilities of the CEO.
In July 2024, Eclipse developer mainnet will be made public;
In September 2024, Eclipse announced the launch of the re-staking 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, the Eclipse mainnet was launched.
