Author: KarenZ, Foresight News
This week, the Solana ecosystem re-staking project Solayer unveiled its roadmap for 2025, with a key 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.
Solayer's chief engineer, Chaofan Shou, joined the Solayer team after abandoning his doctoral studies at UC Berkeley. He revealed that the team drew significant 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 capabilities, making transaction handling more efficient.
In Solayer Chain, every 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. 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, thus eliminating the need for re-execution on the sorter. For the remaining conflicting transactions, Solayer Chain's sorter will re-execute them using a SOTA (State-of-the-Art) scheduling algorithm based on 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 over 16 billion transactions per second (TPS); for conflicting workloads, it can still reach 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 handled every second.
So how exactly is Solayer InfiniSVM 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 workload between dedicated hardware and clusters while retaining a global atomic state.
Solayer states that through the connection of 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 through offloading to hardware circuits and kernels across incoming, sorting, scheduling, banking, and storage.
Here is a brief overview of the Solayer Chain workflow:
1. Transaction arrival: 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 phase: 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 (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 the transaction takes the simple or complex path.
Simple path: If all accounts are up to date during pre-execution, state changes will be directly applied using RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) via local caching on SDN, avoiding 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 of all transactions.
4. State update: The changes in transaction status after execution will be updated to the shard database. The shard database uses RDMA protocol for efficient cross-node data access.
5. Transaction broadcasting: Once the transaction is executed and the state changes are written, it will be broadcasted through global PoPs (Point of Presence, network access points).
In terms of consensus mechanism, Solayer Chain adopts a Proof-of-Authority-and-Stake hybrid consensus protocol, batching transactions into shards (shreds), each containing a slot number, transaction vector, version metadata of accessed accounts, and a link hash. Trusted entities act as sorters and publish shards, while validators stake and vote to determine 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, especially chain-level support, such as:
Hook: Allows developers to embed post-transaction logic such as arbitrage, liquidation, and accounting directly into the chain.
Massive transactions: Supports larger transaction sizes, allowing cross-program calls.
Cross-chain calls: Achieves 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. Moreover, 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 wishing 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 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 (Transaction Initiator).
40% allocated to the program owner (Program Owner), incentivizing them to develop and maintain high-quality programs.
20% allocated to the network to offset additional on-chain computational overhead.
As mentioned above, the model that allocates bidding fees to transaction initiators and program owners will incentivize more developers and users to engage 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 also 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.
