At the beginning of 2025, the new issuance activities on the SVM track on Solana frequently ignited discussions in various 'haircut' groups. First, the Sonic SVM airdrop sparked discussions on social media, followed by another Solana ecosystem project, Solayer, announcing that it would soon conduct a community sale, once again igniting the market's fervent imagination about wealth codes.
According to several social media accounts, due to Solayer's KYC rules, the prices of accounts reselling overseas KYC information have risen, and many 'haircut' bloggers jokingly shared pictures of collecting KYC information in African countries. In response to such popularity, Buidlpad, the partner collaborating with Solayer for this sale, urgently announced on January 13 that the number of registrations far exceeded expectations, and therefore the Solayer community sale would be postponed by 3 days to January 16 to ensure fair distribution.
Is the popularity of Solayer a new expectation for the SVM track or does the project itself have the potential to be a dark horse?
From re-staking to hardware acceleration, three narrative changes within a year
Solayer is a relatively young project, established in 2024, and within less than a year of its founding, Solayer has completed multiple narrative transformations, seemingly hitting the market trends each time.
At its inception, Solayer was positioned as a re-staking protocol. After the mainnet launch in August, it quickly became a hot re-staking protocol on the Solana chain. In that month, it successfully completed a $12 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Binance Labs and Arthur Hayes' family office Maelstrom, achieving a post-investment valuation of $80 million. Previously, Solayer had also completed a round of undisclosed Pre-Seed financing, with investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
In the re-staking track, Solayer has also achieved impressive results. As of January 13, its official data shows that the current TVL amount has reached $370 million, with approximately 275,000 depositors and an average annualized return of 13.41%. It ranks ninth in Solana's TVL and sixth among all re-staking protocols.
However, re-staking does not seem to be Solayer's ultimate goal. In October, Solayer launched the RWA narrative and introduced the synthetic stablecoin Solayer USD, which is also based on government bonds, similar to the recently popular USD0 launched by Usual. Currently, the market cap of this stablecoin is approximately $30 million, ranking sixth in the Solana ecosystem. Of course, this size is still relatively small in the entire network, only ranking 46th.
In December, Solayer quietly updated a blog post titled 'Software Expansion Has Reached Its Limits - The Future Lies in Hardware Expansion,' stating that issues such as state fragmentation, throughput limitations, delays, costs, and system complexity have led to a bottleneck in software upgrades for the Ethereum EVM Layer 2 network. The high performance of Solana and Sui originates from the characteristics of software simplification and hardware acceleration. However, in this article, Solayer did not disclose its next step to upgrade hardware to become the fastest network in the entire network.
Million TPS, 100Gbps, the technological narrative is still effective
Until January 7, Solayer released its 2025 roadmap, stating that through hardware expansion, Solayer will launch the innovative hardware extension SVM, capable of achieving 1M TPS and 100Gbps. PANews learned from reviewing the whitepaper that Solayer proposed the technical principles to reach million-level TPS and 100Gbps bandwidth. The core of this technology comes from a hardware acceleration technology called Infiniband RDMA, which can achieve microsecond-level inter-node communication. This technology can be divided into two parts: one part is Infiniband (wireless bandwidth), which is a high-performance network architecture for efficiently connecting computing nodes, storage systems, and other devices, widely used in supercomputers and data centers.
Another core technology is RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), which allows devices to directly access the memory of remote nodes without operating system intervention. This 'zero-copy' communication method greatly reduces CPU load and communication latency. It is understood that these two technologies are currently mainly used in high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence and machine learning, finance, and distributed storage. In terms of adoption in blockchain networks, Solayer should be a pioneer. As of now, it is still uncertain whether this technology can be realized.
From the team's experience, Solayer's founder Rachel Chu was a core developer at Sushiswap, and another co-founder, Jason Li, graduated from Berkeley with a degree in computer science and previously created the non-custodial Web3 wallet MPCVault. In addition, on January 8, Solayer announced the acquisition of the smart contract mixing company Fuzzland, with one of the goals of this acquisition being to focus on creating the hardware-accelerated SVM chain.
Community sale ignites participation frenzy
On January 9, Solayer announced its first community sale in collaboration with Buidlpad. According to the information released, the total issuance of LAYER tokens is 1 billion, with 30 million tokens offered in this sale, raising a total of $10.5 million, with an average token price of about $0.35, resulting in a token valuation of $350 million. 100% of the LAYER tokens sold in the community sale will be unlocked on the day of the Token Generation Event (TGE).
In addition to the token sale, Solayer also launched a debit card called the Solayer Emerald Metal Card, which is a virtual + physical debit card in partnership with Visa, usable online and offline for exports and legal expenditures. The exact timeline for this product will be announced separately by Solayer. Users participating in this sale have the chance to receive the Solayer Emerald Metal Card. Previously, it was common to see token sales offering whitelists to users who owned certain hardware or products, but Solayer's model of 'buying tokens to receive cards' is relatively rare.
Regardless of the considerations, various 'haircut' studios and many crypto KOLs have been posting tweets about rushing to register KYC on social media. If we draw a comparison with the newly launched Sonic SVM token, the current market cap of SONIC is about $240 million, with a fully diluted market cap of approximately $1.6 billion. Given that the market seems to have higher expectations for Solayer, even according to the $1.6 billion market cap expectation, the appreciation potential for LAYER appears to have a space of 4 to 5 times.
As expected, the KYC subscription for LAYER is exceptionally hot. According to Buidlpad, the current number of registrations is more than 15 times the expectation, and they have also noticed a significant number of bots and 'haircut' studios. Therefore, they had to pause registrations and delay the sale to January 16.
Of course, we cannot predict the performance of LAYER after its launch. However, judging from Solayer's rapid development over the past year, from re-staking to RWA, and then to hardware acceleration and cryptocurrency payment cards, it is evident that this team possesses ample experience in narrative and timing. They have followed a path similar to Hyperliquid, delivering products before technology. If their underlying technological and operational strength can synchronize, achieving the goal of million-level TPS and the milestone of millisecond-level transaction speed, Solayer will truly become the next rising star that cannot be ignored. The outcome of all this depends on when Solayer can bring its product to market.
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