Revisiting Solayer: Why Repeatedly Hitting New Highs? What Are the Technical Highlights?
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Revisiting Solayer: Why Repeatedly Hitting New Highs? What Are the Technical Highlights?
Unlike the previous Ethereum-dominated horizontal scaling approach, the Solayer team presents a completely different scalability strategy in the infiniSVM whitepaper.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Haotian
Let me take a systematic look at $LAYER @solayer_labs, which has shown strong performance in the secondary market recently. Why is its InfiniSVM technology roadmap drawing so much attention? What are the characteristics of hardware-accelerated SVM scaling solutions? And how might the hardware-accelerated Solana scaling ecosystem reshape the industry landscape? Here are my forward-looking observations:
1) Unlike Ethereum's dominant horizontal scaling approach, the Solayer team presents a fundamentally different scaling vision in the InfiniSVM whitepaper: achieving blockchain networks with millions of TPS through hardware-accelerated deep optimization of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). This represents a new paradigm—scaling via tight integration of hardware and software.
Looking back at blockchain scaling history, early on-chain scaling relied on parameter adjustments (larger blocks, shorter block times), but this easily runs into the blockchain trilemma. Later, Layer2 scaling emerged as a horizontal solution—offloading transactions via state channels, sidechains, or rollups—which inevitably sacrifices some degree of global atomicity. In contrast, InfiniSVM’s hardware acceleration path represents an upgraded philosophy: maintaining a single global state while breaking performance bottlenecks through specialized hardware.
In short, InfiniSVM doesn't just optimize algorithms—it rearchitects the SVM execution environment using microservices and hardware acceleration, delegating critical tasks to dedicated hardware to achieve atomicity and consistency under high-load, globally shared states.
2) Following this logic, many may wonder: why does Solana’s SVM execution environment need hardware acceleration? According to data from the Solayer whitepaper, current Solana validator nodes already require CPUs above 3.1GHz, over 500GB of high-speed memory, and more than 2.5TB of high-throughput NVMe storage. Yet even with such specs, CPU utilization peaks around only 30% during high load, and P2P communication is nearing the 1Gbps bandwidth ceiling of consumer-grade networks.
So if CPUs aren’t fully utilized, why demand stronger hardware? The answer reveals that Solana’s bottlenecks lie not in raw CPU power, but elsewhere—such as inefficient microservice processing architecture. By decomposing processes and matching each with optimal hardware resources, or offloading specific tasks like signature verification to dedicated accelerators, performance can be significantly enhanced.
In other words, InfiniSVM isn't simply upgrading hardware—it's redesigning the entire execution environment, applying targeted hardware optimizations for each bottleneck. It's like boosting factory efficiency by reengineering the entire production line rather than merely adding more workers.
3) So what key features define InfiniSVM’s hardware acceleration approach?
1. **Distributed Microservices Architecture**: Instead of Solana’s monolithic transaction pipeline, InfiniSVM breaks down processing into independent stages—signature verification, deduplication, scheduling, storage—and allows them to scale independently, eliminating the “one-blockage-stalls-all” problem.
2. **Intelligent Transaction Scheduling System**: In traditional Solana, transactions from the same account must be processed sequentially. InfiniSVM enables concurrent execution even within the same account, dramatically improving parallelism—essentially enabling finer-grained operational control.
3. **RDMA Low-Latency Communication**: Standard node communication involves packing, transmitting, and unpacking data. RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) allows one node to directly read from another’s memory, reducing communication latency from milliseconds to microseconds, drastically cutting state access conflicts.
4. **Distributed Intelligent Storage Network**: Previously, Solana limited individual account data to 10MB. InfiniSVM adopts a distributed cloud storage model, spreading data across nodes and categorizing access paths as “fast lane” or “slow lane,” overcoming capacity limits while optimizing retrieval speed.
4) Now that the technical upgrade path is clear, the inevitable question arises: “What’s the use?” Overall, hardware acceleration strengthens Solana’s competitive edge at Layer1. Compared to Ethereum’s Layer2 solutions, where scaling benefits only become evident when supported by real application volume, achieving million-TPS performance via hardware could be validated quickly—even by just a few niche verticals.
Take @jito_sol as an example. As Solana’s MEV infrastructure, Jito provides value in transaction ordering optimization, MEV extraction, and validator rewards. Before the MEME coin boom, its importance was unclear. But after the surge in MEME activity over the past year, Jito’s system for optimizing transaction flow became indispensable.
Solayer’s current positioning is similar. The advantages of its system-level upgrades aren’t obvious in simple financial transaction scenarios alone. But consider the future large-scale adoption of PayFi—if Solana is to serve as a high-throughput, low-latency payment and settlement infrastructure, then TPS performance will become critically visible. Other use cases include DePIN ecosystems, complex on-chain games, and AI Agent applications.
In any case, assessing the value of a tech infrastructure project requires foresight. Judging it solely by current utility misses the bigger picture.
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Haotian | CryptoInsight
