1/ What is Somnia? Somnia is the fastest, most cost-effective EVM Layer-1 blockchain, capable of handling 1M+ TPS, sub-second finality, and sub-cent fees. Its performance enables real-time, fully on-chain experiences that extend far beyond financial use cases—making it the ideal foundation for large-scale games, social platforms, AI-powered applications, and much more.

2/ Why Real-Time Matters Most blockchains have struggled to deliver real-time user experiences. Research shows that interactions must be processed within 100ms to feel “instant,” yet Ethereum’s average finality time is over 13 minutes. This gap is why fully on-chain games and applications have been rare. Somnia changes this reality with 1M+ TPS, sub-second finality, and sub-cent fees—all while retaining full EVM compatibility. For the first time, developers can build truly real-time, fully on-chain applications that meet Web2’s speed while upholding Web3’s values of decentralization and ownership.

3/ The Technology Behind Somnia Somnia’s breakthrough performance is powered by four core innovations: 1. MultiStream Consensus – decouples transaction generation from ordering, allowing each validator to maintain its own independent data stream. A separate consensus layer then finalizes ordering globally, which avoids bottlenecks from synchronized block production and enables ultra-fast finality even under heavy load. 2. Accelerated Sequential Execution – instead of relying on fragile parallelization, Somnia compiles EVM bytecode directly into optimized native machine code. This allows CPUs to fully exploit features like pipelining and out-of-order execution, maximizing throughput on a single thread and eliminating the slowdowns typical of correlated transactions. 3. IceDB – Somnia’s custom deterministic database tracks every read and write cost precisely, ensuring consistent gas metering across all nodes. With in-memory cache reads measured in nanoseconds and built-in snapshotting, IceDB provides predictable state access and rapid commits without the overhead of Merkle tree recalculations. 4. Advanced Compression – validators transmit transaction data as continuous streams rather than isolated blocks, enabling compression algorithms to leverage redundancy across history for 10–20x efficiency gains. Combined with BLS signature aggregation, which condenses thousands of signatures into one, this drastically reduces network bandwidth while maintaining security.