Article source: Foresight News
Author: KarenZ, Foresight News
This week, the Solana ecosystem’s restaking project Solayer unveiled its roadmap for 2025, with a core highlight being the upcoming hardware-accelerated SVM blockchain—'Solayer InfiniSVM.' For Solayer, 'Solayer InfiniSVM' is undoubtedly a crucial part of realizing its long-term vision.
Solayer's chief engineer, Chaofan Shou, joined the Solayer team after giving up 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 SmartNIC and programmable switches. This approach significantly enhances the network's processing capacity, making transaction processing more efficient.
In Solayer Chain, every transaction follows a set workflow. Transactions first enter a scalable entry cluster composed of hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, which cleanse 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 there is no need for re-execution on the sorter. For the remaining conflicting transactions, the Solayer Chain sorter will use a SOTA (State-of-the-Art) scheduling algorithm based on the fine-grained account access patterns collected during pre-execution to ensure the fairness and efficiency of transactions.
In terms of performance, Chaofan Shou stated that for simple workloads, Solayer Chain can achieve a transaction processing capacity of over 16 billion transactions per second (TPS); for conflicting workloads, it can still reach a level of 890,000 TPS. This means that on Solayer Chain, billions of USDC transfer requests can be processed every second, as well as trading demands from millions of people apeing into the same memecoin on Raydium.
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 SDN (Software Defined Networking) and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) connections, it can achieve 100 Gbps while maintaining atomic states. 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 Solayer Chain's workflow:
1、Transaction input: Each transaction will enter an initial entry point as shown in the top left corner of the image, where signature verification (sigverify) and local deduplication operations (to avoid duplicate transactions) are performed;
2、Pre-execution phase: The validated 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 (a high-speed, low-latency network architecture designed specifically for high-performance computing and data center environments). The sorter uses SDN switches and FPGAs to determine whether the transaction takes the simple path or the complex path.
Simple path: If all accounts are the latest version during pre-execution, state changes will be applied directly through RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), using local caching 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 update: The state changes of executed transactions are updated in the sharded database. The sharded database uses RDMA protocol to achieve efficient cross-node data access.
5、Transaction broadcasting: After the transaction is executed and the state changes are written, the transaction will be broadcast through global PoPs (Point of Presence, network access points).
In terms of consensus mechanisms, Solayer Chain adopts a Proof-of-Authority-and-Stake hybrid consensus protocol, batching transactions into shreds, each shred containing the slot number, transaction vector, access account version metadata, and linked hash. Trusted entities act as sorters and publish shreds, with validators staking and voting to determine whether shreds can be accepted.
It is worth mentioning that Solayer Chain not only focuses on performance but also introduces multiple 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 and allows cross-program calls.
Cross-chain calls: Achieve cross-chain atomic operations 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; hooks allow developers to directly embed logic such as arbitrage, liquidation, and accounting 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 who want to attach a Hook to a specific program must bid (bidding for the right to execute the hook for the next epoch one epoch at a time), and the bidding price determines whether the Hook can execute 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 computation costs.
The model above allocates bidding fees to transaction initiators and program owners, incentivizing more developers and users to engage in the use of Hooks. This not only enhances the functionality of the platform but also increases the activity on the network. Through this, Solayer Chain can also effectively prevent spam 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.
