The development of blockchain has always been a narrative-driven history. The story of Bitcoin as a decentralized currency has triggered a global frenzy for digital gold, Ethereum has opened a new era of on-chain applications with smart contracts and the concept of a 'world computer', DeFi has brought the logic of traditional finance onto the chain, reshaping the flow of capital, while NFTs combine digital rights confirmation with art and collectibles, becoming a new entry point for the public's understanding of blockchain. Today, as AI technology explodes, RWA continues to expand, and L2 networks gradually mature, a new narrative begins to emerge — that is, on-chain virtual society. And Somnia is a new explorer standing at the forefront of this wave, telling a story that is not just about building a virtual world, but a social experiment of digital civilization.
Why is the narrative of virtual society so important? Because human needs are no longer satisfied with the single dimensions of currency, finance, and art. As the digitalization process accelerates, people's desires for identity recognition, social relationships, and value feedback are becoming increasingly intense. In the traditional internet system, users' behaviors and creations are almost entirely controlled by platforms, and data has become the wealth source for centralized companies, while individuals cannot truly enjoy the rights of value distribution. This asymmetry has sparked reflection among more and more users: is it possible to establish a society truly led by users in the digital space? Somnia is precisely the project trying to answer this question.
The core vision of Somnia is to build a self-operating virtual society through on-chain mechanisms. It hopes that users will no longer be just providers of data, but become citizens of society, possessing secured identities, receiving reasonable value feedback, and participating in the formulation of governance rules. Its evolution path is divided into three stages: the first stage is identity securitization, where users establish digital avatars through on-chain identity NFTs; the second stage is economic circulation, where creators and users' behaviors are rewarded through SOMI tokens, forming a closed-loop incentive system; the third stage is expansion and integration, where the introduction of AI and RWA allows for deeper connections between the virtual society and the real world.
On a technical level, Somnia has chosen a highly forward-looking route. It proposes a MultiStream parallel architecture that allows validators to independently handle different data flows, which are then integrated through a consensus layer, thus solving the concurrency bottleneck of traditional blockchains. Somnia aims to achieve a processing capability of one million TPS; this number sounds exaggerated but is essential for a virtual society. When tens of thousands of users interact, trade, and create simultaneously, the system's fluency directly determines whether society can operate normally. To further enhance efficiency, Somnia employs a native compilation method at the contract execution layer to avoid the extra burden of virtual machines and has developed its own database, IceDB, to optimize state access and data retrieval efficiency. This series of designs aims to provide users with an interaction experience close to Web2.
The SOMI token is the core anchor point of the virtual society narrative. In traditional metaverse projects, tokens often become speculative tools, with unclear value capture logic. Somnia, on the other hand, designs SOMI as a dual hub for economy and governance. All transactions and interactions in the virtual society are settled in SOMI, and creators' works and contributions are also rewarded through SOMI. Token holders can participate in governance through voting, deciding the rules and development direction of society. Somnia has also innovated in its fee design, with half being burned and half distributed to validators, meaning that as transaction frequency increases, the token will enter a gradually deflationary state, thereby enhancing long-term scarcity. This mechanism both ensures network security and guarantees a high binding of token value and ecological activity.
Compared with other similar projects, Somnia's narrative integrity is stronger. While the land economic logic of Sandbox and Decentraland created scarcity in the early stages, it ultimately led to limited user behavior and insufficient long-term motivation. AI-driven identity projects, although innovative in approach, often lack clear economic models and governance mechanisms. Somnia combines identity securitization, economic incentives, and governance systems into a relatively self-consistent closed-loop logic. This makes it not just a concept of a virtual world, but more like a social experiment on the blockchain.
Of course, any narrative must face the challenges of reality. The first is technological risk. The goal of one million TPS currently remains mostly in the theoretical and testing stage, and whether it can be achieved in a real environment still requires extensive validation. Secondly, there is the cold start problem. A virtual society requires enough residents and creators to form genuine activity; without a sufficient user base, even the most refined mechanism will struggle to operate. Thirdly, there are policy and compliance risks. Virtual identities and virtual economies exist in gray areas under different regional legal frameworks, and once regulation tightens, the development path of the project may be restricted. These risks imply that although Somnia's narrative is grand, the process of implementation will inevitably be tortuous.
However, opportunities should not be overlooked either. The rapid development of AI will endow virtual identities with stronger intelligent characteristics, allowing users to create and interact in the virtual society through AI avatars. The rise of RWA provides a path for the integration of reality and the virtual, and if Somnia can map real assets to on-chain identities, the economic circulation of the virtual society will gain more real significance. Moreover, as the Web3 community's consensus on decentralization and user value feedback gradually strengthens, Somnia's narrative is expected to gain recognition on a broader scale.
If we push the narrative limit of Somnia to the extreme, what it depicts is not just a virtual society, but a new prototype of civilization. In this civilization, every user is a citizen, with identity securitization and value feedback giving them a true sense of belonging, while the token mechanism and governance rules give society the ability to self-regulate and evolve. This concept represents not just an experiment of a project for the entire cryptocurrency industry, but potentially an exploration of future directions.
My view is that Somnia's narrative possesses sufficient integrity and foresight, and it indeed has the opportunity to become a core focus in the next narrative cycle. Its advantage lies in its self-consistent mechanism design and clear logic, but its challenges are also very real. Cold start, performance validation, and policy uncertainties are all hurdles that must be crossed. If it can achieve breakthroughs in these areas, I believe Somnia is not just a story of a virtual society, but could potentially be the starting point of the next digital civilization. For investors and users, it deserves long-term attention and serious contemplation.
