If you zoom in on what Solayer is actually building under the hood, the pitch is pretty clear: push dumb, repetitive work into hardware and let CPUs focus on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). That means SmartNICs doing verification and ingress filtering, FPGAs accelerating “megaleader” paths to sequence batches and route conflicts, and then multiple CPU executors stitched together over RDMA so they feel like one giant box.
The goal here isn’t just peak TPS bragging rights. It’s about higher sustained throughput and lower tail latency. By offloading packet chores, CPUs free up cycles to do real SVM execution, which is what developers care about. Pre-execution clusters simulate and tag non-overlapping transactions, while an SDN switch steers flows and keeps a local cache for quick version checks. In plain English: hardware handles the stateless grunt work, while CPUs take care of the flexible, stateful execution layer.
Now, the claims go as high as 1M+ TPS, but that’s an architectural target. Lab numbers during devnet writeups cited more realistic ranges of 250k–340k TPS. Those are still serious figures, but we both know benchmarks move as offload tuning, batch scheduling, and congestion controls mature.
Here’s what I’d watch instead of headline TPS: the p99 latency under burst load with mixed read/write sets. That’s where systems usually break, and RDMA should cut down jitter if it’s tuned properly. The real choke point might not be the hardware at all, but whether batch assembly turns into a new bottleneck.
My take: the mapping of stages to hardware is smart and pragmatic. The unsolved question is failure handling and backpressure. What happens when the “simple path” breaks mid-flight? That’s the make-or-break for whether this hardware-accelerated SVM pipeline becomes production-ready or just a fancy demo.