SVM Track Overview: MoveVM Implementation, How Far Can SVM Go

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 a brand new experience for developers and users, breaking through the performance bottlenecks of traditional blockchain architectures.

Not long ago, the launch of Move gave us considerable expectations for the virtual machine track. After MoveVM, the next hot topic in virtual machines is undoubtedly SVM.

This article will delve into three representative SVM projects—Sonic SVM, SOON, and Eclipse. They share similarities in technical details but also have significant differences; Odaily Planet Daily has compiled and interpreted the public information of these three projects, starting with the first project—Sonic, which just completed its TGE.

Sonic SVM: An SVM for Games, Potentially the Cradle of the Next "Jumping Sheep"

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 Solana's first concurrent scaling framework, HyperGrid, and Sonic is the first Grid instance managed by this framework. Specifically, both HyperGrid and Sonic SVM come from the team behind Sonic (formerly Mirror World), meaning the team is building both the framework and the product, similar to the relationship between Virtuals and Luna.

The original intention of HyperGrid's design 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 on EVM but ultimately executed on Solana, with Solana as the final settlement layer, facilitating the application of the EVM ecosystem on Solana. This is different from the direction of MoveVM technology, which has Ethereum as the final settlement layer.

Another important point to note is that Sonic SVM and the similarly named project Sonic (created by the Fantom team) are completely different projects, and readers should be aware of the distinction between the 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 incubator for high-performance decentralized games, contrasting sharply with traditional in-game asset trading experiences."

On the official website, the advantages of Sonic SVM mainly come from:

• Ultra-fast and low-cost: Sonic provides an ultra-fast on-chain gaming experience for players on all game-specific L1 chains through SVM technology.
• Atomic interoperability: Transactions executed on Sonic do not require redeploying Solana programs and accounts. Directly leverage the advantages brought by Solana's underlying services and liquidity.
• Written for EVM, executed on SVM: Seamlessly deploy dApps from EVM chains to Solana through HyperGrid's interpreter.
• Composable game primitives and sandbox environment: Sonic provides native composable game primitives and scalable data types based on an on-chain ECS framework. Developers can use game engine sandbox tools to build business logic on-chain.
• Profit infrastructure: Sonic natively supports the growth, traffic, payment, and settlement infrastructure for games, empowering developers.

In terms of investors, Sonic is led by Bitkraft, with the following total investor lineup:

Source: Sonic SVM Official Website

Addressing Issues and Solutions

As an infrastructure for games, Sonic SVM specifically addresses the underlying performance pressure of game operations on Solana. The team's own description of this issue is:

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, with the potential to reach 50 million in the coming years. However, alongside user growth is an explosive increase in dApp and DeFi activity. Daily transaction volume is expected to rise from 4 million in 2022 to 200 million in 2024, conservatively estimated to exceed 4 billion by 2026, and could even reach hundreds of billions. This growth trend puts immense performance pressure on Solana. Currently, its blockchain operates at 2500-4000 TPS, with latency fluctuations between 6 to 80 seconds, mostly maintaining around 40 seconds. When TPS exceeds 4000, the transaction success rate drops to 70%-85%. As TPS may reach tens of thousands in the future, performance bottleneck issues will become increasingly prominent. The situation is particularly severe in gaming scenarios. Full-chain games (FOCG) and high-concurrency small games, as well as single large games, may bring instant transaction peaks during special operational events. This pressure not only affects the performance of the Solana main chain but also directly impacts the playability of games and user experience. For the gaming industry, a poor user experience can be a fatal challenge.

To address these issues, Sonic's innovative design primarily targets high concurrency and instant transaction demands in gaming scenarios, providing developers and players with a smooth and efficient on-chain experience.

Sonic x TikTok: What Sparks Will Arise from Web2 Mass Application?

SonicX is Sonic's first TikTok Mini App 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 select users who can directly enter the Web3 gaming world, a process very similar to Telegram.

So how does Sonic specifically achieve this? First, users must have a real TikTok account rather than a Douyin account to log in, which will directly bypass countries and regions where TikTok is unavailable. After that, this portion of KYC-verified users can complete games and tasks through SonicX, interacting with the underlying infrastructure of Sonic SVM. Overall, the design of SonicX is not fundamentally different from most TG mini-programs we see, but since the user base comes directly from TikTok, it saves the KYC requirement while ensuring that most users are real.

Source: SonicX

A natural question arises: if most users come from TikTok, a Web2 platform, will they need to relearn Web3 knowledge to enter SonicX? How will they know what a wallet is? What is a private key? This is precisely where SonicX is most worth learning from. Most operations within SonicX are completely abstracted, except for the need to transfer tokens to a third-party wallet, so users are largely unaware of the existence of a wallet. From Sonic's own Tap-to-Earn to completing related tasks and other games in the game center, SonicX automatically generates a wallet that is strongly bound to the user's TikTok account, without requiring any Web3 expertise to interact with the wallet. Users can even see that the wallet's 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 out for sale on exchanges.

Sonic itself stated in its blog: "TikTok's popularity among KYC-verified users provides us with unique insights into user preferences, creating a strong environment for Sonic games to gain attention. Through a carefully designed user flow, we pave a convenient path for new Web3 players to explore and enjoy blockchain games, seamlessly integrating with their existing TikTok experience."

Through simple logins and incentivized on-chain operations to earn rewards, along with user-friendly guidance processes, SonicX has the potential to drive 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 seen in popular mini-programs. However, infrastructure is always the first step for games to emerge, and using a Web2 traffic channel 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 as a developer, after developing a mobile game, 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 to enter 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 there be a next on-chain version of a mini-program like "Jumping Sheep"? Could this be the mechanism for breaking the circle of Web3 games?

These are all questions that come to mind. Surprisingly, they really created a version of "Jumping Sheep."

At the end of October 2024, Sonic SVM announced a strategic partnership with Mahjong Verse. Mahjong Verse, formerly Mahjong Meta, is also a well-established project in the Web3 gaming space, supported by top investors like Dragonfly and Folius. They created a replica of the "Jumping Sheep" game on the TikTok side of Sonic SVM, but the mechanism changed to eliminating three Mahjong tiles. In other aspects, the levels are similar to "Jumping Sheep," with layers of Mahjong tiles that require strong thinking skills and a bit of luck to pass.

This Mahjong-themed game is also the first game on Sonic Applayer and can now be found in the Game Center of Sonic X. In Sonic's promotional materials, it states, "Integrating Mahjong Verse into our ecosystem not only showcases how our infrastructure supports complex gaming experiences but also retains the usability expected by TikTok users." This can be seen as Sonic Applayer's vision for the future.

In summary, Sonic SVM focuses on gaming infrastructure, with clear application examples already on TikTok Applayer. It has now reached the token issuance stage, and we look forward to seeing what the next game released through Sonic SVM will look like and whether it can achieve a breakthrough through TikTok as a traffic entry point.

Timeline

In June, Sonic announced the completion of a $12 million Series A financing round, led by Bitkraft Ventures, with participation from Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, and others. It is reported that the fully diluted token valuation in this round of financing reached $100 million. Sonic's legal entity, Mirror World Labs, has built a proprietary technology called the HyperGrid Framework, which enables horizontal scaling through rollups on the Solana chain.

In September, Odaily reported that Sonic SVM recently announced the sales information for HyperFuse Guardian Nodes, claimed to be the first node sale in the Solana ecosystem.

The official announcement stated 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 purchase Sonic tokens at a price lower than that offered to venture capitalists during Sonic's $12 million Series A financing 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, with the snapshot yet to be taken, and the airdrop will take place 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 ecosystem development (30%), initial claims (7%), and HyperGrid rewards (20%).

Tokenomics of Sonic SVM. Source: X

On January 3, Sonic SVM announced on the X platform that the initial claim for SONIC would soon be open, aimed at rewarding supporters and contributors. Currently, the SONIC eligibility checker has also been launched, allowing users to check their eligibility for the initial claim.

On January 7, Sonic SVM will officially TGE, with confirmed exchanges including OKX, Upbit, Bybit, KuCoin, Backpack, and others.

SOON: A Project with No VC Participation, the Strongest Execution Layer on Ethereum

30K+ TPS, Source: SOON Official Website

SOON's product 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, designed for maximum performance, supporting the deployment and operation of SVM Layer 2 on any underlying Layer 1. The chain deployed through SOON Stack is referred to as the SOON chain. 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 is the SOON chain deployed on Ethereum using SOON Stack, aiming to become the highest-performing L2 on Ethereum.

InterSOON is a cross-chain messaging protocol designed to ensure smooth interaction between networks. It achieves 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.

Core Advantages of SOON

Currently, many projects themed around scalability are using SVM as the foundation, but SOON's uniqueness lies in that it is the optimal SVM Rollup framework specifically designed for efficient performance. By decoupling SVM from its TPU (Transaction Processing Unit), SOON achieves a true enhancement in performance and maximization of efficiency.

Why did SOON choose decoupling instead of Forked SVM?

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, only adjusting some parameters, but does not modify the key TPU or TVU (Transaction Validation Unit).
• Waste of data availability: The biggest problem with Forked SVM is the inefficient use of blobspace in the data availability (DA) layer. For example, even with just one "ordering node," each block will still generate voting transactions, consuming a lot of resources.

SOON adopts a customized decoupled SVM, optimizing transaction processing efficiency and DA usage by removing voting transactions and peer-to-peer network overhead. Especially in cases where L1 consensus mechanisms are not required (such as Proof of History and Leader Schedule), decoupled SVM can optimize more flexibly.

Key benefits of decoupling:

• Support for Fraud Proofs: The decoupled SVM provides native support for fraud proofs for L2, which is core 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.
• Enhanced performance and security: By optimizing transaction processing and DA usage, SOON Stack significantly reduces resource waste while enhancing network security, meeting the high throughput and security demands of Web3 applications.

The SOON team has analyzed decoupled SVM in detail in this blog for interested readers. (The original text is in English)

Mission and Outlook of SOON

SOON Stack aims to achieve the following goals:

• Provide high-performance Rollup solutions in any L1 ecosystem.
• Reduce transaction costs by 10 times.
• Promote the widespread adoption of SVM.
• Unlock innovative application scenarios across ecosystems.

Addressing the Issue: Why Higher Performance Rollups and Tech Stacks Are Needed

The issues addressed by the SOON team are completely different from those of Sonic SVM. The technology stack provided by SOON will ultimately settle on the Ethereum main chain, targeting the performance inadequacies 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 bottlenecks limit scalability: Most current Rollup frameworks still use single-threaded operating environments, leading to inefficient processing and causing network congestion and high transaction fees during high-demand periods, severely restricting the scalability potential of decentralized applications.
• Gap in the 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.
• Fragmentation of EVM liquidity: The multi-chain phenomenon in the EVM ecosystem leads developers to redeploy the same products, resulting in decreased product quality and insufficient user attraction, while the Solana ecosystem centralizes resources through a unified environment, significantly enhancing product and community experience.
• Ethereum fee market issues: Ethereum's global fee market mechanism causes high-demand transactions (like NFTs) to drive up all transaction fees, limiting the economic viability of everyday transactions. The localized fee market of SVM solves this problem 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, high development thresholds and operating costs hinder its popularity, making large-scale applications difficult to achieve in the short term.
• Rust's advantages can aid SVM: SVM uses Rust as the smart contract language, providing a higher performance and safer development environment, solving issues like memory safety and concurrent processing compared to Solidity, making it more suitable for high-performance blockchain application development.
• Parallel processing enhances network performance: EVM's sequential processing limits network throughput, while SVM achieves simultaneous processing of multiple transactions through parallel processing technology, significantly improving network performance and ensuring quick responses and low costs even during high-demand periods.

In other words, Sonic SVM and SOON are strictly speaking only on the same SVM track, and they are not direct competitors. Sonic SVM targets the performance limitations of Solana, with Solana as the final settlement layer; while SOON will build L2 on Ethereum, addressing the performance bottlenecks of Ethereum.

Ecological Applications on SOON

Removing all infrastructure applications, let's look at some interesting toC applications on SOON. The biggest direction is in DeFi;

The SOON official website showcases six applications in the DeFi direction, most of which should be native DeFi applications. The number of followers on the X platform is not very high, but the functions 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, includes products such as lending, bridging, staking, and earning, and has its own points system. It is currently live on Solana, Sui, Eclipse, SOON, and Movement, with 163K followers on the X platform.

Blendy, a rather interesting project: it provides currency market services specifically for meme coins and AI agent-related assets, with all collateral being meme coins, which aligns well with current trends. It is still in the testnet phase, and the project team announced that the number of transactions has exceeded 150,000.

In terms of other applications that users can directly experience, there are four more interesting applications on SOON:

• Aeronyx: Aeronyx is based on SOON's DePIN protocol, connecting millions of devices and tokenizing 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 interaction between humans and AI.
• 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 the Solana Optimistic Network (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 Wormhole Foundation co-founder Robinson Burkey, among others. The specific financing amount has not been disclosed.

SOON Co-builder Round, Source: SOON

This round of financing is specifically aimed at co-builders, and no venture capital firms participated. This means that no venture capital funds have entered SOON's total funding.

On November 8, SOON announced the official launch of its 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 live and released the SOON token economic model, with an initial total supply of 1 billion tokens (with an annual inflation rate of 3%), and the community allocation accounts for 51%. The distribution also includes 25% for ecosystem allocation, 8% for airdrops and liquidity distribution, 6% for foundation/treasury allocation, and 10% for team and co-builder allocation.

SOON Tokenomics, Source: SOON

In the blog post announcing the Alpha mainnet, SOON wrote:

The $SOON token distribution adopts a fair launch model: there are no pre-mined tokens, no pre-allocations to teams 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 in 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, so stay tuned!

Eclipse: The First SVM to Launch, But No Token Issued

Eclipse is a competitor to SOON, also launched as an SVM L2 on Ethereum. From the official website, Eclipse is a research-heavy, ecosystem-focused L2, and its design is quite stylish. In terms of stages, Eclipse is not lagging behind the two competitors mentioned above; the mainnet has actually been launched, but no tokens have been issued, strategically positioning itself closer to the Ethereum ecosystem, aiming to provide a pure "Solana speed experience on Ethereum."

Eclipse's introduction states,

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 strict verifiability constraints. Through this design, Eclipse achieves a balance between performance and security, providing strong technical support for decentralized applications.

Eclipse uses Celestia as its DA.

A very obvious difference is that Eclipse has not issued its own token, instead using Ethereum as the gas token for the entire L2, effectively tying itself closely to the Ethereum ecosystem. At the same time, Eclipse has issued a re-staking Ethereum token, which drives L2 through this part.

Turbo ETH (tETH) is a unified re-staking token (URT) launched by Eclipse in collaboration with Nucleus, aimed at integrating the highest-yield protocols on Ethereum into a simple and user-friendly 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-staking 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, providing on-chain users with a new liquidity management tool.

tETH is a token with exchange rate yields, similar to Compound's cTokens and Lido's wstETH, where the ETH-based yields increase the exchange rate over time, while non-ETH rewards can be claimed through a separate interface.

As of the date of publication, according to DeFiLlama data, the total TVL of Eclipse's entire chain has reached $19.33 million, which is not very high. The number of followers on the X platform is 195,000.

Eclipse Ecosystem

In terms of the DeFi ecosystem, the largest DEX on Eclipse is Orca, with a current TVL of $9.2 million, followed by the lending protocol Save with a TVL of $3.55 million, and the second-largest DEX Invariant with a TVL of $3.25 million. All these figures have seen significant growth in the past month.

Now, let's look at consumer applications. Here are some applications in the Eclipse ecosystem that have garnered considerable attention on the X platform:

• After School Club: An NFT series and also Eclipse's genesis NFT;
• SEND Arcade: A platform where users can win ETH by playing games;
• Dscvr.one: A social protocol with around 80,000 followers on the X platform;
• HedgeHog: A prediction market also on Solana;
• AllDomains: Eclipse's domain service;
• Moonlaunch.fun: Pump.fun on Eclipse;
• Blobscriptions: Inscriptions on Eclipse.

Timeline:

In September 2022, Eclipse announced that it had completed a $15 million Pre-Seed and seed round financing at a valuation of over $1 billion, with $9 million of the seed round led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, and participation from Caballeros Capital, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Soma Capital, Struck Capital, and CoinList; another $6 million was from the Pre-Seed round, led by Polychain Capital, with Tribe Capital, Tabiya, Galileo, Polygon Ventures, The House Fund, and Accel participating. 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 via Polygon SVM, opening doors for communities using and building on different blockchains.

In December 2023, Eclipse's testnet was made public;

In March 2024, Eclipse Labs announced the completion of a $50 million Series A financing round, co-led by Placeholder and Hack VC, with total financing reaching $65 million. This round also attracted participation from investors such as RockTree Capital, Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, funds managed by Apollo, Fenbushi Capital, and ParaFi Capital, as well as 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, Eclipse's founder and CEO Neel Somani resigned due to sexual harassment allegations, with Vijay Chetty taking over. Chetty was promoted from Chief Growth Officer and assumed all responsibilities of the CEO. Chetty has over ten years of native cryptocurrency experience, having held leadership positions at Uniswap Labs, dYdX Trading, and Ripple Labs, in addition to his investment experience at BlackRock.

In July 2024, Eclipse's developer mainnet was 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 went live.