Dismantling the SVM Arms Race: A Perspective on the Competition Among Top Performers Solayer, SOON, and Sonic SVM

Written by: JiaYi

What would the Crypto world look like if Ethereum achieved 10,000 TPS or higher in another parallel universe?

As the most anticipated "seed player" in the new narrative of the Solana ecosystem for 2025, the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) seems to be gradually turning this hypothesis into reality through three breakthrough players—Sonic, SOON, and Solayer.

Especially against the backdrop of the urgent need for a new narrative in Solana in 2025, these three leading players in the SVM ecosystem are attempting to answer the industry's ultimate question of "high concurrency, low latency, and cross-chain compatibility" through differentiated technical paths. This article will also dissect the deeper logic of this SVM arms race from three dimensions: underlying architecture, ecological strategy, and market positioning.

Why is SVM Important in 2025?

"I am the Ethereum killer, bring money," has become a rare narrative in recent years as the era of new public chains easily grabbing land, financing, and hype from 2018 to 2020 has long passed.

In simple terms, the game of merely copying the EVM architecture + TPS numbers can no longer meet the evolutionary needs of Web3—according to the Electric Capital developer report, EigenLayer, Aptos, and Solana rank as the top three fastest-growing cryptocurrency ecosystems for new developers in 2024, with growth rates of 167%, 96%, and 83%, respectively.

In terms of developer share, Ethereum remains the largest ecosystem on every continent, but Solana, ranked second, is the preferred ecosystem for new developers, marking the first ecosystem since 2016 to attract more new developers than Ethereum.

This shift reflects a profound change in industry perception: the blockchain war has shifted from a "narrative battle" to an "execution environment revolution." Especially after the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) completed its architectural upgrades and welcomed new developers, its essence is not to replace a specific public chain but to potentially reconstruct the entire technical paradigm of the smart contract execution layer.

So what exactly is SVM? It stands for Solana Virtual Machine, which is the execution environment for processing transactions, smart contracts, and programs on the Solana network, specifically designed to address certain scalability and user experience challenges.

As is well known, the traditional EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) performs well in terms of compatibility, but in high-frequency application scenarios such as gaming, DeFi, and social networks, performance often falls short. SVM, based on Solana's core performance, offers extremely fast transaction speeds and lower gas fees.

Most importantly, SVM supports parallel processing of transactions, unlike EVM, which requires transactions to be processed one by one (like having only one cashier during peak shopping hours). The benefit is that multiple transactions can run simultaneously, maintaining speed during high-demand periods while keeping fees low.

As the Solana ecosystem nurtures SVM, Sui and Aptos build MoveVM, the technological evolution of the Crypto ecosystem presents a clear strategic roadmap: the core battlefield of the next-generation blockchain war is shifting from the consensus layer to execution environment innovation.

SVM itself is an extension of Solana's influence—the better SVM performs, the greater Solana's influence becomes.

The Technical Paths and Ecological Ambitions of the Three SVM Giants

SOON: The Movement of SVM

Objectively speaking, SOON's positioning is more like "the Movement within SVM," prioritizing community engagement in its construction, while a relatively unique aspect is its financing through co-builder rounds and a fair community launch model.

So if the Movement brought Move to Ethereum, then SOON takes it a step further, bringing SVM to all L1s: and it differs significantly from the imagined "Solana L2," as it does not rely on the Solana mainnet but provides flexible scalability through the SOON Stack, allowing SVM to be deployed on other mainstream Layer 1s.

This design allows any L2 in a public chain ecosystem to enjoy the advantages of SVM, including faster transaction speeds and lower gas fees. Therefore, SOON and other SVM projects face entirely different execution environments, requiring higher-performance rollups and technology stacks to assist.

After all, the multi-chain prosperity of the broader EVM ecosystem forces developers to reinvent the wheel (deploying a project across multiple chains), resulting in decreased product quality and user fatigue. SOON, on the other hand, centralizes resources in a unified environment, significantly optimizing the developer experience.

Regarding fees, Ethereum's "global charging model" is truly unkind—a popular NFT auction can drive up the costs of your ordinary transactions. In contrast, SOON's localized fee market is quite clever: you pay only what you need, without interference.

At the same time, SOON's private placement round has attracted a number of well-known project co-founders (such as Solana, Celestia, etc.), allocating 51% of the tokens to NFT purchasers and promptly responding to community feedback. This aligns with the Movement's philosophy—valuing the community and being willing to listen to its voice, ultimately driving project success together and enjoying the positive effects it brings.

In terms of actual project progress, SOON's development is also the fastest among the three SVM giants. In a sense, SOON is not just the "king of competition"; its design actually addresses the "old problems" of both EVM and Solana. If you are a market operator, you might learn some tricks from its community-oriented and resource-centralized approach—user experience and efficiency can be a win-win.

Solayer: I Have TVL, I Also Have Efficiency

In the past year, Solayer's narrative switch has been textbook-level: from "re-staking protocol" to "RWA stablecoin," and then to "hardware-accelerated SVM," each time precisely hitting market hotspots.

I have always said that the team's understanding and execution, combined with luck, ultimately determine the project's ceiling. Founders Rachel (former core developer at Sushiswap) and Jason (founder of MPCVault) possess both product and technical intuition, as evidenced by their acquisition of Fuzzland to enhance chain security—fast narrative switching, strong financing, and full execution capability.

I first heard about Solayer over a year ago when EigenLayer was booming, and Solayer emerged, focusing on staking on Solana, aiming to become the "Solana version of EigenLayer."

Because of this, Solayer started in the SOL staking ecosystem, particularly laying a solid initial foundation based on Solana's staking data and infrastructure. However, recent updates indicate that Solayer is no longer limited to staking but is beginning to venture into the SVM technology track.

So what is the core competitiveness of a project that started with staking as it enters the SVM technology field?

There is a key point that cannot be overlooked: Solayer's acquisition of the technology company FuzzLand and the creation of Solayer InfiniSVM together mark the beginning of a new narrative layout for Solayer, aiming to be the first public chain to implement hardware-accelerated expansion solutions, ultimately achieving a truly high-speed public chain.

Solayer's 2025 roadmap proposes "Infiniband RDMA technology," targeting over a million TPS and 100 Gbps. Its hardware acceleration claims to offload key blockchain operations to dedicated hardware components, which handle various operations from transaction sorting and scheduling to storage, enabling transaction confirmations within 1 millisecond. If the technical solution can be realized, it is indeed expected to achieve a significant advantage over Monad.

In simple terms, in the Solayer Chain, each transaction follows a workflow where transactions first enter a scalable entry cluster composed of hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes. These nodes will clean and pre-execute transactions based on probabilistic predictions of future states.

Subsequently, all execution snapshots will be 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 to execute them again on the sorter.

Don't understand? No problem, here's a simple example to help you grasp it:

• Imagine you are at an airport queueing for security checks, where each person's luggage is scanned by machines (corresponding to the transaction cleaning and pre-execution phase). Most luggage is generally fine and can be released directly;
• But if the machine detects a suspicious issue with a piece of luggage (conflicting transaction), it will be sent to a higher-level checkpoint for detailed inspection (sorting and re-execution), equipped with top-notch detection equipment and professionals (Intel Tofino switches and FPGAs), ensuring that the luggage checks are both efficient and fair;
• In this airport, simple luggage checks can process 16 billion items per second (simple transaction TPS); even problematic luggage can be processed at 890,000 items per second (conflicting transaction TPS);
• In other words, the airport (Solayer's SVM) can simultaneously handle billions of passengers' routine luggage checks and millions of problematic luggage checks in one second, ensuring efficiency while accommodating special cases.

Like SOON mentioned above, Solayer has also gained recognition from Solana and major institutions, with two rounds of financing attracting investments from Solana co-founder Toly and top institutions including Binance Labs (now YZi Labs) and Polychain.

Sonic SVM: The "Breakthrough Engine" for Chain Game Infrastructure

Sonic SVM is the earliest project in the SVM track to conduct a TGE and is now listed on most mainstream exchanges except Binance.

Unlike the SVM projects mentioned above, Sonic SVM focuses on gaming—its innovative design primarily addresses the high concurrency and instantaneous transaction needs in gaming scenarios.

The entire technology of Sonic SVM is built on the HyperGrid framework, which is also Solana's first concurrent expansion framework, designed to achieve high customization and scalability while maintaining native composability with Solana.

Because HyperGrid allows developers to write applications in the EVM environment but ultimately executes on Solana, with the settlement layer still being Solana, it makes it easier for developers to use familiar programming languages to write projects, reducing the time needed to understand a new public chain.

It is worth mentioning that Sonic SVM is the first Grid instance within the HyperGrid framework—doesn't that sound similar to the relationship between Virtuals and Luna?

Additionally, Sonic's Guardian Nodes system focuses on verifying on-chain user behavior. Through this mechanism, it effectively prevents bot attacks and malicious behavior, providing a safer interaction environment for gamers, while the operation of the nodes also ensures the stability of network performance.

Another key highlight of Sonic is its TikTok Mini App—SonicX, which leverages TikTok's vast user base. SonicX generates a wallet linked to the user's TikTok account through a simple login process, achieving seamless account abstraction.

This design significantly lowers the entry barrier for Web3, allowing ordinary users to participate in various chain game activities without needing to understand private keys and on-chain operations (just a side note, TikTok currently faces policy risks in Europe and the US, and its traffic prospects are always shrouded in uncertainty, so whether this new user acquisition channel can sustain is a challenge).

Overall, the three major projects in the SVM track each have their own characteristics:

• Sonic SVM: Focuses on chain game experience through TikTok traffic and seamless on-chain interaction;
• Solayer: Concentrates on enhancing efficiency with higher performance, combining re-staking and liquidity optimization to expand its ecosystem;
• SOON: Starts from the community, learning from the Movement's approach to extend SVM to the entire blockchain world;

Conclusion

A great wind rises from the edge of the green rush; behind every successful token issuance, there often lies an important clue: the infrastructure needed by the market is being redefined!

From DeFi to chain games, and then to social applications, users' demands for "speed, low cost, and high experience" are becoming increasingly strong. In this process, the bottlenecks of traditional EVM are gradually becoming apparent, and it is precisely because of these limitations that the innovations of SVM are particularly important.