Solana's top narrative for 2025, a comprehensive interpretation of Solayer, SOON, and Sonic SVM.
Written by: JiaYi
What would the crypto world look like if Ethereum achieved 10,000 TPS or more in another parallel universe?
As the most anticipated new narrative for the Solana ecosystem in 2025, the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) seems to be gradually bringing this hypothesis to reality through three breakthrough players—Sonic, SOON, and Solayer.
Especially against the backdrop of Solana's new narrative needing a transition in 2025, these three leading players in the SVM ecosystem are attempting to address the industry's ultimate proposition of 'high concurrency, low latency, and cross-chain compatibility' through differentiated technical paths. This article will also dissect the deeper logic of this SVM arms race from three dimensions: underlying architecture, ecological strategy, and market positioning.
Why is SVM important in 2025?
'I am the Ethereum killer, send money,' accompanied by the departure of the era when new public chains effortlessly seized land, financed, and speculated between 2018 and 2020, few have mentioned the 'Ethereum killer' narrative in recent years.
In simple terms, merely copying EVM architecture + TPS numbers can no longer meet the evolving needs of Web3—according to the Electric Capital Developer Report, EigenLayer, Aptos, and Solana rank among the top three ecosystems for new developers in 2024, with growth rates of 167%, 96%, and 83%, respectively.
In terms of developer share, Ethereum remains the largest ecosystem on every continent, but Solana ranks second, becoming the preferred ecosystem for new developers. This is the first ecosystem since 2016 to attract more new developers than Ethereum.
This shift reflects a profound transformation in industry awareness: the blockchain war has shifted from 'narrative disputes' to 'execution environment revolutions', especially as the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) completes architectural upgrades and new developers pour in. Its essence is not to replace any public chain but to potentially reconstruct the technical paradigm of the entire smart contract execution layer.
So what exactly is SVM? Its full name is Solana Virtual Machine, which is the execution environment for processing transactions, smart contracts, and programs on the Solana network, specifically designed to solve particular scaling and user experience challenges.
As we know, traditional EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) performs well on compatibility, but in high-frequency application scenarios like gaming, DeFi, and social networks, performance often falls short. SVM, based on Solana's core performance, provides extremely fast transaction speeds and lower gas fees.
The key point is that SVM supports parallel processing of transactions, unlike EVM which requires them to be processed one by one (like having only one cashier during a busy shopping period). The benefit is that multiple transactions can run simultaneously, remaining fast during high demand periods with low fees.
As the Solana ecosystem nurtures SVM, Sui and Aptos are building MoveVM, the technological evolution of the crypto ecosystem presents a clear strategic roadmap: the core battlefield of the next generation blockchain war is shifting from the consensus layer to execution environment innovation.
SVM itself is an extension of Solana's influence—the better SVM performs, the greater Solana's influence becomes.
The technical paths and ecological ambitions of the SVM Trio.
SOON: The Movement of SVM.
Objectively comparing, SOON's positioning resembles 'Movement within SVM', prioritizing community engagement in its construction. An especially unique aspect is completing financing through co-builder rounds and a fair community startup model.
So if Movement brought Move to Ethereum, then SOON takes it a step further, capable of bringing SVM to all L1s: and it differs considerably from the imagined 'Solana L2', as it does not rely on the Solana mainnet but provides flexible scaling capabilities through the SOON Stack, allowing SVM to be deployed on other mainstream Layer 1s.
This design allows any public chain ecosystem's L2 to enjoy the advantages of SVM, including faster transaction speeds and lower gas fees. Therefore, SOON and other SVMs face distinctly different execution environments, requiring higher performance rollups and tech stacks for support.
After all, the multi-chain prosperity of the pan-EVM ecosystem forces developers to reinvent the wheel (multiple chain deployments for a single project), resulting in declining product quality and user exhaustion. SOON, however, concentrates resources in a unified environment, significantly optimizing the developer experience.
Speaking of fees, Ethereum's 'global charging model' is really not considerate— a popular NFT auction can push up the costs of your regular transactions. In contrast, SOON's localized fee market is quite clever: pay exactly what you should without interference.
At the same time, SOON's private placement round attracted a number of well-known project co-founders (such as Solana, Celestia, etc.), and 51% of the tokens were allocated to NFT purchasers, promptly responding to community feedback. This aligns with the Movement philosophy—valuing the community and being willing to listen to community voices, ultimately driving project success and enjoying the positive effects it brings.
From the perspective of actual project progress, SOON is also developing the fastest among the SVM trio. In some ways, SOON is not just the 'king of competition'; its design actually addresses the 'old issues' of EVM and Solana. If you're a market operator, you might learn a few tricks from its community-oriented and resource concentration approach—user experience and efficiency can be a win-win.
Solayer: I have TVL, and I also have efficiency.
In the past year, Solayer's narrative switch has been textbook level: from 're-staking protocol' to 'RWA stablecoin', and then to 'hardware-accelerated SVM', each time precisely hitting the market hotspots.
I have always said that the team's awareness and execution, combined with luck, ultimately determine the project's ceiling. Founder Rachel (former core developer of Sushiswap) and Jason (founder of MPCVault) possess both product and technical intuition, and the acquisition of Fuzzland to strengthen chain security is a testament to this—fast narrative switching, strong financing, and full execution.
I first heard about Solayer over a year ago when EigenLayer was booming, and Solayer emerged, focusing on staking directions on Solana, aiming to become the 'EigenLayer of Solana'.
This is precisely why Solayer started in the SOL staking ecosystem, particularly based on Solana's staking data and infrastructure, establishing a solid initial foundation. However, recent developments indicate that Solayer is no longer limited to staking but is beginning to venture into the SVM technology track.
What is the core competitive advantage of a project that originated from staking as it enters the SVM technology field?
There is actually a key point that cannot be overlooked: Solayer's acquisition of technology company FuzzLand and the creation of Solayer InfiniSVM together. This has become the opportunity and leverage for Solayer to embark on a new narrative layout, aiming to be the first public chain to achieve a hardware acceleration expansion solution, ultimately realizing a high-speed public chain.
Solayer's 2025 roadmap proposes 'Infiniband RDMA technology', aiming for a million TPS + 100 Gbps. Its hardware acceleration claims that by offloading key blockchain operations to dedicated hardware components, the hardware components handle various operations from transaction sorting and scheduling to storage. This can achieve a 1 millisecond transaction confirmation. If the technical solution can be implemented, it is indeed expected to achieve a significant crushing of Monad.
In simple terms, in the Solayer Chain, each transaction follows a set workflow. Transactions first enter a scalable entry cluster composed of hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes, which clean and pre-execute transactions based on probability predictions of future states.
Subsequently, all execution snapshots will be sent to a sorter built with Intel Tofino switches and additional FPGAs. It is worth noting that most transactions are already confirmed as valid during the pre-execution phase, so there is no need for re-execution on the sorter.
Don't understand? No problem, here's a simple example to help you grasp it:
Imagine you are at an airport waiting in line for security checks, where each person's luggage is scanned by machines (corresponding to the cleaning and pre-execution phase of transactions). Most luggage is generally fine and can be released directly;
However, if the machine detects a suspected issue with a piece of luggage (conflicting transaction), it will be sent to a higher-level checkpoint for detailed inspection (sorting and re-execution). This checkpoint is equipped with top-notch detection equipment and professionals (Intel Tofino switches and FPGAs), ensuring that luggage inspections are both efficient and fair;
In this airport, simple luggage checks can process 16 billion items per second (simple transaction TPS); even problematic luggage can be processed at 890,000 items per second (conflicting transaction TPS);
In other words, the airport (SVM of Solayer) can handle conventional luggage checks for billions of passengers simultaneously in one second, as well as complex checks for millions of problematic luggage, ensuring both efficiency and consideration for special cases.
Like the aforementioned SOON, Solayer has also gained recognition from Solana and major institutions. Its two rounds of financing included investments from Solana co-founder Toly and support from top institutions including Binance Labs (now YZi Labs) and Polychain.
Sonic SVM: The 'breaking circle engine' of blockchain gaming infrastructure.
Sonic SVM is the earliest TGE project in the SVM track, and it has already launched on most mainstream exchanges aside from Binance.
Unlike the previously mentioned SVM projects, Sonic SVM focuses on gaming—its innovative design primarily addresses the high concurrency and instantaneous transaction demands in gaming scenarios.
Sonic SVM's entire technology is built on the HyperGrid framework, which is also Solana's first concurrent expansion framework. The design intention is to achieve high customization and scalability while maintaining native composability with Solana.
Because HyperGrid supports developers to write applications in the EVM environment but ultimately executes them on Solana, the settlement layer remains Solana, allowing developers to use familiar programming languages to write projects, reducing the time needed to understand new public chains.
It is worth mentioning that Sonic SVM is the first Grid instance within the HyperGrid framework—doesn't it resemble the relationship between Virtuals and Luna?
Additionally, Sonic's Guardian Nodes system focuses on verifying user behavior on-chain. Through this mechanism, it effectively prevents bot attacks and malicious behavior, providing a safer interaction environment for gamers, and the operation of nodes also ensures the stability of network performance.
Another key highlight of Sonic is its TikTok Mini App—SonicX. With TikTok's massive user base, SonicX generates a wallet linked to the TikTok account for users through a simple login, achieving seamless account abstraction.
This design greatly lowers the entry barrier for Web3, allowing ordinary users to participate in various activities in blockchain gaming without needing to understand private keys and on-chain operations (by the way, TikTok currently faces policy risks in Europe and the US, and its traffic prospects are always shrouded in a layer of shadow, so whether this new user acquisition channel can work long-term is a challenge).
Overall, the three major projects in the SVM track each have their own characteristics:
Sonic SVM: By leveraging TikTok traffic and seamless on-chain interaction models, it focuses on enhancing the gaming experience on the chain.
Solayer: Focuses on improving performance efficiency, combining re-staking and liquidity optimization to expand the ecosystem.
SOON: Aims to learn from the community-oriented approach of Movement to extend SVM to the entire blockchain world.
Conclusion
A strong wind rises at the edge of the green grass; behind every successful token issuance, there is often a crucial clue: the infrastructure needed by the market is being redefined!
From DeFi to blockchain games to social applications, user demand for 'fast, low-cost, high-experience' is growing stronger. During this process, the limitations of traditional EVM have gradually become apparent, and it is precisely because of these constraints that the innovation of SVM has become particularly important.
