Author: KarenZ, Foresight News
This week, the Solana ecosystem's re-staking project Solayer unveiled its 2025 roadmap, with the highlight being the upcoming hardware-accelerated SVM blockchain - "Solayer InfiniSVM". For Solayer, "Solayer InfiniSVM" is undoubtedly an important step in realizing its long-term vision.
Solayer's chief engineer Chaofan Shou, after abandoning his doctoral studies at UC Berkeley, joined the Solayer team. He revealed that the team gained a lot of inspiration from the Solana validator client Firedancer during the development process, and decided to offload most of Solana's components to SmartNIC and programmable switches. This approach can greatly improve the network's processing capability, making transaction processing more efficient.
In the Solayer Chain, each transaction follows a workflow. Transactions first enter a scalable entry cluster of tens of thousands to millions of nodes, which will clean and pre-execute the transactions based on probability predictions of future state. Then, all execution snapshots will be sent to an orderer built with Intel Tofino switches and additional FPGAs. It is worth noting that most transactions have already been confirmed as valid during the pre-execution stage, so there is no need to re-execute them on the orderer. For the remaining conflicting transactions, the Solayer Chain orderer will use a state-of-the-art scheduling algorithm based on the fine-grained account access patterns collected during pre-execution to ensure the fairness and efficiency of the transactions.
In terms of performance, Chaofan Shou stated that for simple workloads, Solayer Chain can achieve a transaction processing capacity of over 16 billion transactions per second (TPS); and for workloads with conflicts, it can reach 890,000 TPS. This means that on the Solayer Chain, billions of USDC transfer requests and millions of ape transactions on Raydium for the same memecoin can be processed every second.
So how is Solayer InfiniSVM implemented?
How is the Solayer Chain implemented?
According to the Solayer Chain Lightpaper, the Solayer Chain achieves infinite scalability of a single-state blockchain by distributing workloads between dedicated hardware and clusters, while retaining the global atomic state.
Solayer states that through SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) connections, 100 Gbps can be achieved while maintaining atomic state. Solayer InfiniSVM offloads to hardware circuits and cores, spanning ingress, ordering, scheduling, banking, and storage, to achieve 1ms transaction confirmation.
Here is a brief overview of the Solayer Chain workflow:
1. Transaction ingress: Each transaction enters an initial entry point as shown in the top left of the figure, which will perform signature verification (sigverify) and local deduplication (to avoid duplicate transactions);
2. Pre-execution stage: Verified transactions are then sent to the pre-execution cluster for pre-execution.
3. Ordering and scheduling: Transaction results and intermediate snapshots are sent to the orderer via InfiniBand (a high-speed, low-latency network architecture tailored for high-performance computing and data center environments). The orderer uses SDN switches and FPGAs to determine whether a transaction takes the simple or complex path.
Simple path: If all accounts in the transaction were the latest version during pre-execution, the state changes will be directly applied via RDMA using local caches on the SDN, avoiding further processing by the orderer.
Complex path: If at least one account has an updated version, the transaction will enter the local memory pool. The orderer schedules the transactions in the local memory pool to achieve fairness and optimal parallel execution for all transactions.
4. State update: The updated transaction states are written to the sharded database. The sharded database uses the RDMA protocol to achieve efficient cross-node data access.
5. Transaction broadcast: After the transaction is executed and the state changes are written, the transaction is broadcast through global PoPs (Points of Presence).
In terms of the consensus mechanism, Solayer Chain adopts a hybrid Proof-of-Authority-and-Stake consensus protocol, batching transactions into shreds, with each shred containing the slot number, transaction vector, version metadata of accessed accounts, and a linking hash. Trusted entities act as orderers and publish the shreds, while the validators stake and vote to determine whether the shreds can be accepted.
It is worth mentioning that Solayer Chain not only focuses on performance, but also introduces several user experience improvements, especially at the chain level, such as:
- Hooks: Allowing developers to embed post-transaction logic such as arbitrage, liquidation, and accounting directly into the chain.
- Mega Transactions: Support for larger transaction sizes, allowing cross-program invocations.
- Cross-Chain Calls: Atomic operations across chains through built-in system programs.
- Built-in OAuth Support: Allowing users to use OAuth services like Google, X, or Reddit as their wallets.
Let's emphasize Hooks here. Hooks allow developers to embed logic such as arbitrage, liquidation, and accounting directly into the chain. Solayer Chain also has an incentive and fee model for Hooks. The execution of Hooks follows a Dutch auction-like bidding model. Developers or users who want to attach a Hook to a specific program need to bid (bidding for the right to execute the Hook in the next epoch, on a per-epoch basis), and the bidding price determines whether the Hook can be executed and its priority. The top 16 highest bidders win.
Each time a Hook is executed, its bidding amount is distributed as follows:
- 40% goes to the Transaction Initiator.
- 40% goes to the Program Owner, incentivizing them to develop and maintain high-quality programs.
- 20% goes to the network, to offset the additional on-chain computational overhead.
This model of distributing the bidding fee to the transaction initiator and program owner will incentivize more developers and users to participate in the use of Hooks. This not only improves the functionality of the platform, but also increases the activity of the network. Through this, Solayer Chain can also effectively prevent spam transactions or malicious MEV exploitation off-chain, providing an additional layer of protection for the network.
Solayer Chain's vision is not only to improve performance, but also to integrate more user experience and developer-friendly features into blockchain technology.
