Is the era of millisecond trading coming? A quick overview of Solayer Chain in one article

By KarenZ, Foresight News

This week, Solana ecological re-staking project Solayer unveiled its 2025 roadmap. The core highlight is the upcoming hardware-accelerated SVM blockchain-"Solayer InfiniSVM". For Solayer, "Solayer InfiniSVM" is undoubtedly an important part of realizing its long-term vision.

Chaofan Shou, Solayer's chief engineer, joined the Solayer team after giving up his doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He revealed that the team got a lot of inspiration from the Solana verifier client Firedancer during the development process, and decided to offload most of Solana's components to SmartNICs and programmable switches. This method can greatly improve the processing capacity of the network and make transaction processing more efficient.

In Solayer Chain, every transaction follows a set of workflow. Transactions first enter a scalable ingress cluster of hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes that clean and pre-execute transactions based on probabilistic predictions of future states. All execution snapshots are then sent to a sequencer built with Intel Tofino switches and additional FPGAs. It is worth noting that most transactions are already confirmed as valid during the pre-execution stage and therefore do not need to be executed again on the sequencer. For the remaining conflicting transactions, Solayer Chain's sequencer will re-execute using the SOTA (State-of-the-Art) scheduling algorithm based on the fine-grained account access patterns collected in pre-execution to ensure the fairness and efficiency of the transactions. .

In terms of performance, Chaofan Shou said that for simple workloads, Solayer Chain can achieve a transaction processing capacity of more than 16 billion transactions per second (TPS); for conflicting workloads, it can also reach the level of 890,000 TPS. This means that every second on Solayer Chain, USDC transfer requests from billions of people can be processed, as well as the transaction needs of millions of people ape the same memecoin on Raydium.

So how is Solayer InfiniSVM implemented?

How is Solayer Chain implemented?

According to the Solayer Chain Lightpaper, Solayer Chain enables infinite scaling of single-state blockchains by distributing workloads across dedicated hardware and clusters while preserving global atomic state.

Solayer says that through SDN (Software Defined Networking) and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) connections, it can achieve 100 Gbps while remaining atomic. Solayer InfiniSVM achieves 1ms transaction confirmation by offloading to hardware circuits and kernels, spanning incoming, sorting, scheduling, banking, and storage.

Here is a brief overview of the Solayer Chain workflow:

1. Transaction incoming: Each transaction will enter an initial entry point as shown in the upper left corner of the figure below. This entry point will perform signature verification (sigverify) and local deduplication operations (to avoid repeated transactions);

2. Pre-execution phase: The verified transaction is then sent to the pre-execution cluster for pre-execution.

3. Sorting and scheduling: Transaction results and intermediate snapshots are sent to the sequencer via InfiniBand, which provides a high-speed, low-latency network architecture tailored for high-performance computing and data center environments. The sequencer uses SDN switches and FPGAs to decide whether a transaction should take a simple path or a complex path.

Simple path: If all accounts are up to date when the transaction is pre-executed, state changes will be applied directly via RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), using a local cache on SDN, avoiding further processing by the sequencer.

Complex path: If at least one account has a newer version, the transaction will go into the local mempool. The sequencer schedules transactions in the local mempool to achieve fair and optimal parallel execution of all transactions.

4. Status update: The transaction status changes after execution will be updated to the sharded database. The sharded database uses the RDMA protocol to achieve efficient cross-node data access.

5. Transaction broadcast: After the transaction is executed and the status change is written, the transaction will be broadcast through global PoPs (Point of Presence, network access point).

In terms of consensus mechanism, Solayer Chain uses the Proof-of-Authority-and-Stake hybrid consensus protocol to process transaction batches into fragments (shreds). Each fragment contains slot number, transaction vector, access account version metadata and link. hope. Trusted entities act as orderers and publish shards, and provers all stake and vote to decide whether a shard can be accepted.

It is worth mentioning that Solayer Chain not only focuses on performance, but also introduces a number of user experience improvements, especially chain-level support, such as:

• Hook: Allows developers to embed post-trade logic such as arbitrage, liquidation, and accounting directly into the chain.
• Huge Transactions: Supports larger transaction sizes, allowing cross-program calls.
• Cross-chain calls: Implement cross-chain atomic operations through built-in system programs.
• Built-in OAuth support: Enables users to use OAuth services such as Google, X, or Reddit as wallets.

Here we focus on Hooks, which allow developers to embed logic such as arbitrage, liquidation and accounting directly into the chain. And Solayer Chain also sets an incentive and fee model for hooks. Hooks are executed using a bidding model similar to a Dutch auction. If developers or users want to attach a Hook to a specific program, they need to bid (bidding epoch by epoch for the right to execute the hook in the next epoch). The bidding price determines whether the Hook can be executed and the priority of execution. The first 16 highest bidders win.

Each time the Hook is executed, its bid amount will be distributed according to the following proportions:

• 40% is allocated to the Transaction Initiator.
• 40% is allocated to Program Owners to incentivize them to develop and maintain high-quality programs.
• 20% is allocated to the network to offset additional on-chain computational overhead.

The above model of allocating bidding fees to transaction initiators and program owners will encourage more developers and users to participate in the use of Hooks. Doing so not only improves the functionality of the platform, but also increases the activity of the network. Through this, Solayer Chain can also effectively prevent spam transactions or off-chain malicious MEV exploitation, providing an additional layer of protection for the network.

The vision of Solayer Chain is not only to improve performance, but also to incorporate more user experience and developer-friendly features into blockchain technology.