Solayer Chain Quick Read: Is the Millisecond Transaction Era Here?
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Solayer Chain Quick Read: Is the Millisecond Transaction Era Here?
What Is Solayer Chain? 1 Millisecond Transaction Confirmation, 100 Gbps
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy KarenZ, Foresight News
This week, Solana ecosystem restaking project Solayer unveiled its 2025 roadmap, with the centerpiece being the upcoming hardware-accelerated SVM blockchain—"Solayer InfiniSVM." For Solayer, "Solayer InfiniSVM" is undoubtedly a pivotal step toward realizing its long-term vision.
Chaofan Shou, Solayer's lead engineer, joined the team after leaving his Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley. He revealed that the team drew significant inspiration from Solana’s validator client Firedancer during development and decided to offload most of Solana’s components onto SmartNICs and programmable switches. This approach dramatically enhances network processing capabilities, making transaction execution far more efficient.
In Solayer Chain, every transaction follows a defined workflow. Transactions first enter a scalable ingress cluster composed of hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, where they are cleaned and pre-executed based on probabilistic predictions of future state. Then, all execution snapshots are sent to a sequencer built on Intel Tofino switches and additional FPGAs. Notably, most transactions are already confirmed as valid during pre-execution and thus do not require re-execution on the sequencer. For the remaining conflicting transactions, Solayer Chain’s sequencer employs a state-of-the-art (SOTA) scheduling algorithm based on fine-grained account access patterns collected during pre-execution, ensuring fairness and efficiency in transaction processing.
In terms of performance, Chaofan Shou stated that for simple workloads, Solayer Chain can achieve over 16 billion transactions per second (TPS), while still reaching 890,000 TPS under conflict-heavy workloads. This means Solayer Chain could handle USDC transfer requests from billions of people per second, or accommodate millions of users apeing into the same memecoin simultaneously on Raydium.
So how exactly does Solayer InfiniSVM achieve this?
How Does Solayer Chain Work?
According to the Solayer Chain Lightpaper, Solayer Chain achieves infinite scalability for a single-state blockchain by distributing workloads across specialized hardware and clusters while preserving global atomic state.
Solayer claims that using SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) connectivity enables maintaining atomic consistency at 100 Gbps. Solayer InfiniSVM achieves 1ms transaction confirmation by offloading functions—such as ingress, sequencing, scheduling, banking, and storage—to hardware circuits and kernels.
Here is a brief overview of the Solayer Chain workflow:
1. **Transaction Ingress**: Each transaction enters an initial ingress point (shown in the upper-left corner of the diagram below), which performs signature verification (sigverify) and local deduplication (to prevent duplicate transactions).
2. **Pre-Execution Phase**: Verified transactions are then forwarded to a pre-execution cluster for speculative execution.
3. **Sequencing and Scheduling**: Transaction results and intermediate snapshots are transmitted via InfiniBand—a high-speed, low-latency networking architecture tailored for high-performance computing and data centers—to the sequencer. The sequencer uses SDN switches and FPGAs to determine whether a transaction takes the simple or complex path.
Simple Path: If all accounts involved in a transaction are up-to-date during pre-execution, state changes are directly applied via RDMA using locally cached data on the SDN, bypassing further processing on the sequencer.
Complex Path: If at least one account has been updated, the transaction enters a local mempool. The sequencer schedules transactions within the mempool to ensure fair and optimally parallel execution across all transactions.
4. **State Update**: Post-execution state changes are written into a sharded database. The sharded database leverages RDMA protocols to enable efficient cross-node data access.
5. **Transaction Broadcast**: After execution and state write-in, the transaction is broadcast globally through Points of Presence (PoPs).
Regarding consensus, Solayer Chain adopts a hybrid Proof-of-Authority-and-Stake consensus protocol. It batches transactions into shreds, each containing a slot number, transaction vector, version metadata of accessed accounts, and link hashes. Trusted entities act as sequencers publishing shreds, while validators stake and vote to determine shred acceptance.
Notably, Solayer Chain focuses not only on performance but also introduces several user experience enhancements, particularly chain-level features such as:
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Hooks: Allow developers to embed post-transaction logic like arbitrage, liquidations, and accounting directly into the chain.
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Mega Transactions: Support larger transaction sizes enabling cross-program calls.
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Cross-Chain Calls: Enable atomic operations across chains via built-in system programs.
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Built-in OAuth Support: Allows users to use OAuth services like Google, X, or Reddit as wallets.
Let’s dive deeper into Hooks. Hooks allow developers to embed logic such as arbitrage, liquidation, and accounting directly on-chain. Solayer Chain also implements an incentive and fee model for Hooks. Hook execution uses a Dutch auction-like bidding mechanism: developers or users wishing to attach a Hook to a specific program must bid (epoch-by-epoch for the right to execute the Hook in the next epoch). The bid amount determines both whether the Hook executes and its execution priority. The top 16 highest bidders win.
Each time a Hook executes, its bid amount is distributed as follows:
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40% goes to the transaction initiator.
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40% goes to the program owner, incentivizing them to develop and maintain high-quality programs.
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20% goes to the network, offsetting additional on-chain computational overhead.
This model of distributing bid fees to both transaction initiators and program owners encourages broader participation from developers and users in using Hooks. It not only enhances platform functionality but also increases network activity. Furthermore, it helps prevent spam transactions and off-chain MEV exploitation, adding an extra layer of protection for the network.
Solayer Chain’s vision extends beyond performance enhancement—it aims to integrate superior user experiences and developer-friendly innovations into blockchain technology itself.
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