Architecture primer: consensus and execution goals
Somnia’s technical messaging centers on delivering enormous throughput while remaining EVM-compatible. That implies Somnia uses a custom execution and consensus stack that differs from general-purpose, gas-limited EVM chains: the chain designers talk about parallelization, specialized data availability strategies, and other architectural layers that allow thousands to millions of operations per second while still providing deterministic, verifiable execution for smart contracts. EVM compatibility suggests that Somnia either reimplements the EVM in a high-performance runtime or provides a translation layer that maps Solidity and EVM bytecode onto a more parallelizable execution substrate. To achieve sub-second finality while keeping costs low, Somnia must solve latency tradeoffs: low latency typically requires geographically distributed consensus participants and compact block commitments; high throughput often implies sharding or parallel execution; affordable fees require efficient fee markets and compression for on-chain data. The docs frame Somnia as combining those techniques into a platform explicitly tuned for fast, synchronous experiences like games and social apps, where players expect immediate feedback and microtransactions at scale. While marketing often leads with impressive TPS figures, the technical specifics that produce those figures — block production cadence, validator set architecture, and data availability design — are where the practical tradeoffs will appear in real deployments and in independent benchmarks.
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