SVM Arms Race: The Battle of the Top Students of Solayer, SOON, and Sonic SVM

If Ethereum achieved a transaction processing capability of 10,000 transactions per second or higher in another parallel universe, what would the cryptocurrency world look like? This hypothesis seems to be gradually becoming a reality through three key projects in the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) ecosystem—Sonic, SOON, and Solayer.

Against the backdrop of Solana's new narrative needing a successor in 2025, these three leading projects in the SVM ecosystem are attempting to address the industry's core issue of "high concurrency, low latency, and cross-chain compatibility" through different technological paths. This article will delve into the internal logic of this SVM technology competition from three aspects: underlying architecture, ecological strategy, and market positioning.

The Importance of SVM in 2025

In recent years, the term "Ethereum killer" has rarely been mentioned. Simply copying the EVM architecture and increasing TPS numbers can no longer meet the development needs of Web3. According to statistical data, EigenLayer, Aptos, and Solana rank among the top three cryptocurrency ecosystems with the fastest growth in new developers in 2024, with growth rates of 167%, 96%, and 83%, respectively.

From the perspective of developer share, Ethereum remains the largest ecosystem across continents, but Solana, ranked second, has become the preferred ecosystem for new developers. This is the first time since 2016 that an ecosystem has attracted more new developers than Ethereum.

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

SVM is the execution environment for processing transactions, smart contracts, and programs on the Solana network, specifically designed to address certain scalability and user experience issues. Compared to traditional EVM, SVM performs better in high-frequency application scenarios (such as gaming, DeFi, social networks, etc.), offering extremely fast transaction speeds and lower Gas fees.

SVM supports parallel processing of transactions, which means that multiple transactions can be executed simultaneously, maintaining fast processing and low fees even during high demand periods. As the Solana ecosystem develops SVM, Sui and Aptos build MoveVM, the technological evolution of the cryptocurrency ecosystem presents a clear strategic roadmap: the core battleground of next-generation blockchain competition is shifting from the consensus layer to innovations in execution environments.

The development of SVM directly reflects the expansion of Solana's influence— the better SVM performs, the greater Solana's influence.

The Technical Path and Ecological Strategy of the Three Major SVM Projects

SOON: The community driving force of SVM

SOON is positioned more like a "community-driven project in SVM," prioritizing community needs during its development process. Unlike other projects, SOON completes its financing through co-builder rounds and a fair community launch model.

The goal of SOON is to bring SVM to all mainstream public chains, rather than solely relying on the Solana mainnet. Through the SOON Stack, it offers flexible scalability, allowing SVM to be deployed on other mainstream Layer 1s. This design enables any L2 in a public chain ecosystem to benefit from the advantages of SVM, including faster transaction speeds and lower gas fees.

The localization fee market design of SOON is more aligned with user needs: transaction fees for different applications do not affect each other, avoiding the problem of network-wide fee fluctuations like those on Ethereum.

The private placement round of SOON attracted the participation of co-founders from several well-known projects and allocated most of the tokens to community members. The project team actively responded to community feedback, reflecting their emphasis on the community's voice.

In terms of actual progress, the development speed of SOON is the fastest among the three major SVM projects. It not only pursues high efficiency but also aims to address the issues present in both EVM and Solana, providing users with a better experience and higher efficiency.

Solayer: The Dual Pursuit of Efficiency and TVL

In the past year, Solayer's project positioning has been adjusted multiple times, from "re-staking protocol" to "RWA stablecoin," and then to "hardware-accelerated SVM," with each transformation closely following market trends.

The founding team of Solayer possesses both product and technical insight, as evidenced by the wise move of acquiring Fuzzland to enhance chain security. The project demonstrates a rapid narrative adjustment capability, strong financing strength, and excellent execution.

Solayer initially focused on staking on Solana, benchmarking "EigenLayer for Solana". However, recent developments indicate that Solayer has started to venture into the SVM technology track.

Solayer acquired the technology company FuzzLand and jointly created Solayer InfiniSVM, which became a key milestone in its entry into the SVM technology field. Solayer's 2025 roadmap proposed "Infiniband RDMA technology," aiming to achieve one million TPS and 100 Gbps processing capability.

Its hardware acceleration solution aims to offload key blockchain operations to dedicated hardware components, covering various operations from transaction sorting and scheduling to storage, with the potential to achieve a transaction confirmation time of 1 millisecond. If this technical solution can be successfully implemented, it may significantly surpass the performance of existing blockchains.

The transaction processing flow of Solayer is designed to be very meticulous: transactions first enter a scalable entry cluster composed of hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, which preprocess the transactions based on predictions of future states. Subsequently, execution snapshots are sent to the sorter built with Intel Tofino switches and FPGAs, where most transactions are confirmed as valid during the pre-execution phase and do not need to be executed again.

Solayer has completed two rounds of financing, receiving support from well-known investors including the co-founder of Solana, as well as favor from top institutions.

Sonic SVM: A Breakthrough in Gaming Infrastructure

Sonic SVM is the earliest project in the SVM track to conduct a token generation event (TGE) and is currently listed on multiple mainstream exchanges.

Unlike other SVM projects, Sonic SVM focuses on the gaming sector, with its innovative design primarily targeting the high concurrency and instant transaction demands in gaming scenarios.

Sonic SVM is built on the HyperGrid framework, which is the first concurrent scaling framework for Solana, designed for high customization and scalability while maintaining native compatibility with Solana. HyperGrid allows developers to write applications in the EVM environment but ultimately executes them on Solana, with the settlement layer still being Solana. This design significantly reduces the learning curve for developers, enabling them to develop projects using familiar programming languages.

Sonic SVM is the first Grid instance in the HyperGrid framework, and its Guardian Nodes system focuses on verifying on-chain user behavior, effectively preventing bot attacks and malicious activities, providing a safer interaction environment for gamers.

Another highlight of Sonic is its TikTok mini-program SonicX. With a simple login method, users can generate a wallet linked to their TikTok account, achieving seamless account abstraction. This design significantly lowers the entry barrier to Web3, allowing ordinary users to participate in blockchain gaming activities without needing to understand private keys and on-chain operations.

Conclusion

Behind every successful token issuance lies the market's demand for a redefinition of infrastructure. From DeFi to blockchain games and social applications, users' demand for "speed, low cost, and high experience" is growing. The limitations of traditional EVM are gradually becoming apparent, which is why the innovation of SVM is particularly important.

The three major projects of the SVM track each have their own characteristics: Sonic SVM focuses on optimizing the gaming experience on the blockchain; Solayer is dedicated to improving performance efficiency; SOON adopts a community-driven approach to expand SVM to the entire blockchain world. This technological competition not only promotes the development of the Solana ecosystem but also outlines a new blueprint for the future of the entire blockchain industry.