Overview of the SVM track: MoveVM is implemented, how far can SVM go?

Author: jk, Odaily Planet Daily

As the demand for high performance and scalability becomes more and more urgent, Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) is gradually becoming an important part of promoting the development of decentralized ecosystem. By combining the speed of Solana with the ecological advantages of Ethereum, innovative projects based on SVM are creating a new experience for developers and users, breaking the performance bottleneck of traditional blockchain architecture.

Not long ago, the launch of Move gave us a lot of expectations for the virtual machine track. After MoveVM, the first virtual machine hotspot is SVM.

This article will delve into three representative SVM projects - Sonic SVM, SOON and Eclipse. They have similarities in technical details but also have big differences; Odaily Planet Daily has compiled the public information of these three projects and added them To explain, let’s start with the first project—Sonic, which was just released by TGE.

Sonic SVM: SVM for games may be the cradle of the next "sheep makes a

sheep"

According to the official website, Sonic SVM is the first atomic SVM chain, designed to support the aggregation and settlement of the sovereign game economy on Solana.

Sonic SVM is built on HyperGrid, Solana's first concurrency scaling framework, and Sonic is the first Grid instance managed by the framework. Specifically, both HyperGrid and Sonic SVM come from the team behind Sonic (formerly Mirror World), which is equivalent to the team itself building the framework and products at the same time, similar to the relationship between Virtuals and Luna.

HyperGrid is designed to be highly customizable and extensible while maintaining native composability with Solana. According to the developer documentation, applications supported by HyperGrid can be written on EVM, but are ultimately executed on Solana. The final settlement layer is Solana, which is conducive to bringing EVM ecological environment applications to Solana. This is different from the direction of MoveVM technology whose final settlement layer is Ethereum.

Another issue that needs to be noted is that Sonic SVM and the project of the same name Sonic (created by the Fantom team) are two completely different projects. Readers need to pay attention to the difference between projects and assets.

The team's vision is that Sonic was born to unlock new experiences for developers and players. "We designed Sonic to create an incubator for high-performance decentralized games, in stark contrast to the traditional in-game asset trading experience."

On the official website, the advantages of Sonic SVM mainly come from:

• Extremely fast and low-cost: Sonic uses SVM technology to provide ultra-fast on-chain gaming experience for players in all game-exclusive L1 chains.
• Atomic interoperability: Execute transactions on Sonic without redeploying Solana programs and accounts. Take advantage of Solana's underlying services and liquidity directly.
• Written for EVM, executed on SVM: Seamlessly deploy dApps from the EVM chain to Solana through HyperGrid's interpreter.
• Composable game primitives and sandbox environment: Sonic is based on the on-chain ECS framework and provides native composable game primitives and extensible data types. Developers can use game engine sandbox tools to build business logic on the chain.
• Monetization infrastructure: Sonic natively supports the game's growth, traffic, payment and settlement infrastructure to empower developers.

In terms of investors, Sonic is led by Bitkraft, and the total investor lineup is as follows:

Source: Sonic SVM official website

Dealing with problems and solutions

As an infrastructure for games, Sonic SVM specifically solves the problem of underlying performance pressure when running games on Solana. The team’s own statement on this issue is:

From 2022 to 2023, the number of wallet accounts will grow from 100,000 to 1 million, and is expected to exceed 5 million in 2024, and is expected to reach 50 million in the next few years. However, parallel to user growth is the explosive growth of dApp and DeFi activities. Daily transaction volume will increase from 4 million in 2022 to 200 million in 2024, and is conservatively estimated to exceed 4 billion by 2026, and may even reach tens of billions.

This growing trend puts Solana under tremendous performance pressure. Currently, under the condition of 2500-4000 TPS, the delay of its blockchain fluctuates between 6 and 80 seconds, and in most cases remains around 40 seconds. When TPS exceeds 4000, the transaction success rate drops to 70% -85%. As TPS may reach tens of thousands in the future, performance bottlenecks will become increasingly prominent.

The situation is particularly severe in gaming scenarios. Full-chain games (FOCG), as well as highly concurrent small games and single large games, may bring instantaneous transaction peaks during special operating activities. This pressure not only affects the performance of the Solana main chain, but also directly affects the playability and user experience of the game. For the gaming industry, poor user experience can be a fatal challenge.

In order to deal with these problems, Sonic's innovative design mainly targets the high concurrency and instantaneous transaction requirements in game scenarios, providing developers and players with a smooth and efficient on-chain experience.

Sonic x TikTok: What sparks will emerge in the diversion of large-scale

Web2 applications?

SonicX is Sonic's first TikTok Mini App and also Sonic's gaming platform on TikTok. TikTok has more than 1 billion monthly active users. What Sonic has to do is to select users who can directly enter the Web3 game world, and this process will be very similar to Telegram.

So how exactly does Sonic do it? First of all, users must have a real Tiktok account instead of a Douyin account to log in, which will directly bypass countries and regions where Tiktok is not available. Afterwards, this part of KYC verified users can complete games and tasks through SonicX and interact with the underlying facilities of Sonic SVM. Generally speaking, the design of SonicX is not fundamentally different from most of the TG applets we can see. However, because the user group comes directly from Tiktok, it saves the need for KYC and ensures that most users are real. of.

Source: SonicX

Then, a natural question arises: If most users come from Tiktok, a Web2 platform, do they have to relearn Web3 knowledge when they enter SonicX? How do they know what a wallet is? What is a private key? This is precisely the most worthwhile aspect of SonicX. Most operations in SonicX, except for actually transferring tokens to a third-party wallet, are completely abstract. Users are basically unaware of the existence of a wallet. . From Sonic's own Tap-to-Earn, to completing related tasks, to other games in the game center, SonicX automatically generates a wallet that is strongly bound to the user's Tiktok account, without requiring any Web3 expertise to interact with the wallet Interaction. You can even see in the user center that the wallet avatar has been imported from Tiktok. In other words, in theory, this infrastructure can support complete account abstraction, and users do not need to understand the encryption industry until they need to "sell their account" or transfer game tokens to be sold on the exchange.

Sonic himself said this in his blog: "TikTok's popularity among KYC-verified users provides us with unique insights into user preferences, creating a powerful environment conducive to Sonic games gaining attention. Through carefully designed user flows, We have paved a convenient path for new Web3 players to explore and enjoy blockchain games, integrating seamlessly with their existing TikTok experience.”

By simply logging in, motivating on-chain operations to earn rewards, and adding a user-friendly guidance process, SonicX has the potential to generate traffic through Tiktok. If there is any disadvantage, it is that the settings of SonicX itself and other games are relatively simple, and there are no particularly eye-catching mechanisms and gameplay like the popular mini-programs. However, infrastructure is always the first step for the emergence of games, and diversion through a Web2 is still the most likely prerequisite for the success of current Web3 games.

This is also the direction in which Sonic SVM currently has the most unique advantages. Imagine that after you develop a mobile game as a developer, you can seamlessly deploy it to Solana on the backend and Tiktok on the frontend. If a video about this game becomes popular, users can directly click to enter the game through the official account without registering a wallet, but the tokens in the game are all real on-chain tokens. So, is it possible that the next on-chain version of the Tiaoyitiao applet will appear or will it fail? Will this be the mechanism for Web3 games to break the circle?

These are all easy questions to think about. What I didn't expect was that they actually made a "sheep makes a sheep".

At the end of October 2024, Sonic SVM announced a strategic partnership with Mahjong Verse. Mahjong Verse, formerly known as Mahjong Meta, is also a veteran project in the Web3 gaming industry and is supported by top investors such as Dragonfly and Folius. They made a replica of the game "Sheep of a Sheep" on the Tiktok side of Sonic SVM, except that the mechanism changed to eliminate them by collecting three mahjong tiles. In other respects, the level is the same as "Sheep Got a Sheep". There are layers of mahjong tiles, which requires strong thinking ability and a little luck to pass the level.

This Mahjong-themed game is also the first game on Sonic Applayer and can now be found in Sonic X's Game Center. In Sonic's announcement, it said, "Integrating Mahjong Verse into our ecosystem not only demonstrates how our infrastructure can support complex gaming experiences, but also retains the ease of use that TikTok users expect." As you can see, This is also the future vision of Sonic Applayer.

To sum up, Sonic SVM focuses on the underlying infrastructure of games. It has clear application examples in Tiktok Applayer. It has now reached the currency issuance stage. We are looking forward to what the next game released through Sonic SVM will look like. Can it be used through Tiktok? The traffic entrance reaches a broken circle.

timeline

In June, Sonic announced the completion of a $12 million Series A round of financing, led by Bitkraft Ventures, with participation from Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, etc. It is reported that its fully diluted token valuation in this round of financing reached $100 million. Sonic's legal entity, Mirror World Labs, has built a proprietary technology called the HyperGrid Framework that enables horizontal scalability through rollups on the Solana chain.

In September, Odaily reported that Sonic SVM recently announced the sales information of HyperFuse Guardian Nodes, which is said to be the first node sale in the Solana ecosystem.

The official announcement states that HyperFuse Guardian Nodes are an integral part of the security and functionality of the Sonic Hypergrid framework in the SVM ecosystem. Node operators will help verify state transitions and improve network efficiency. Early adopters have the opportunity to buy Sonic tokens at a price lower than what was offered to venture capital investors during Sonic’s $12 million Series A funding round. This node sale is a key component of Sonic's plan to develop the SVM ecosystem and Solana gaming track. The company also revealed that it has partnered with more than 40 game studios and has more than 2 million active wallets on the platform.

At the end of December, Sonic SVM announced that it would airdrop SONIC tokens on the Solana blockchain to all users who join its game. The snapshot has not yet been taken, and the airdrop will take place in January.

At the same time, Sonic SVM announced the token economics of its native token $SONIC. The total supply of SONIC is 2.4 billion, of which 57% is allocated to the community, including community and ecological development (30%), initial claim (7%) and HyperGrid rewards. (20%).

Tokenomics for Sonic SVM. Source:X

On January 3, Sonic SVM announced on the

On January 7, Sonic SVM will be officially listed on TGE. Exchanges that have confirmed listing include OKX, Upbit, Bybit, KuCoin, Backpack, etc.

SOON: A project without any VC participation, the strongest execution

layer on Ethereum

TPS above 30K, source: SOON official website

SOON's product is called Super Adoption Stack, including SOON Stack and SOON main network.

SOON Stack is a Rollup framework based on OP Stack and unique Decoupled SVM (decoupled SVM). It is designed to achieve maximum performance and supports the deployment and running of SVM Layer 2 on any basic Layer 1. The chain deployed through SOON Stack is called SOON chain. Currently, SOON Stack supports Ethereum as the settlement layer, Avail as the data availability (DA) layer, and integrates the support of Caldera and Altlayer.

The SOON mainnet is a SOON chain deployed on Ethereum using SOON Stack, aiming to become the most powerful L2 of Ethereum.

InterSOON is a cross-chain messaging protocol designed to ensure smooth interactions between networks. It realizes the interoperability between SOON main network, SOON Stack (SOON chain) and other Layer 1 blockchains, connecting all networks together through a seamless interface. InterSOON's underlying cross-chain messaging is powered by Hyperlane.

SOON’s core strengths

Currently, many extension-themed projects are based on SVM, but SOON is unique in that it is the optimal SVM Rollup framework designed for efficient performance. By decoupling SVM and its TPU (transaction processing unit), SOON achieves true performance improvement and efficiency maximization.

Why did SOON choose decoupling instead of Forked SVM?

Limitations of Forked SVM:

• Waste of Default Architecture: Many projects using SVM outside of Solana L1 are Forked SVM. This method directly uses the existing Solana client and only adjusts some parameters without modifying the key TPU or TVU (transaction verification unit).
• Wasted data availability: The biggest problem with Forked SVM is the inefficient use of blobspace at the data availability (DA) layer. For example, even if there is only one "ordering node", voting transactions will still be generated for each block, which takes up a lot of resources.

SOON uses a customized decoupled SVM to optimize transaction processing efficiency and DA usage by removing voting transactions and point-to-point network overhead. Especially when the L1 consensus mechanism is not required (such as Proof of History and Leader Schedule), decoupled SVM can be optimized more flexibly.

Key benefits of decoupling:

• Support Fraud Proofs: Decoupled SVM provides L2 with the ability to natively support fraud proofs, which is the core of L2 network security. Fraud proofs ensure the security of L2 state by validating user transactions from L1 deposits (export pipeline) and L2 ordering nodes.
• Improved performance and security: By optimizing transaction processing and DA usage, SOON Stack significantly reduces resource waste, while enhancing network security to meet the high throughput and security requirements of Web3 applications.

The SOON team analyzes decoupled SVM in detail in this blog , interested readers can read it. (Original text in English)

SOON’s mission and vision

SOON Stack aims to achieve the following goals:

• Provide high-performance rollup solutions in any L1 ecosystem.
• Reduce transaction costs by 10x.
• Promote widespread adoption of SVM.
• Unlock innovative application scenarios across ecosystems.

Targeted question: Why do we need higher performance Rollup and

technology stack?

The problems addressed by the SOON team are completely different from those of Sonic SVM. The technology stack provided by SOON will eventually be settled on the Ethereum main chain, aiming at the problem of insufficient performance of the Ethereum main chain. So, what are the problems they plan to solve? The following content is excerpted and summarized from SOON's blog:

• Single-threaded bottleneck limits scalability: Most current Rollup frameworks still use a single-threaded operating environment, which results in low processing efficiency and can easily lead to network congestion and high transaction fees during periods of high demand, severely restricting the expansion potential of decentralized applications.
• Gap in the developer ecosystem: There is a clear gap between the dApp quality and developer capabilities of the EVM ecosystem and SVM. The SVM ecosystem has attracted more high-level developers and developed high-quality products, such as Jupiter, through stronger engineering culture and tool support.
• The liquidity of EVM is fragmented: The multi-chain phenomenon of the EVM ecosystem causes developers to repeatedly deploy the same products, resulting in reduced product quality and lack of user appeal. However, the Solana ecosystem concentrates resources through a unified environment, significantly improving product and community experience.
• Ethereum fee market problem: Ethereum’s global fee market mechanism allows high-demand transactions (such as NFT) to drive up all transaction fees, limiting the economics of daily transactions. SVM's localized fee market solves this problem by independently calculating fees to avoid unrelated transactions affecting each other.
• Complexity of zk-VM: Although zk-VM technology has potential in terms of privacy and scalability, its high development threshold and high operating costs hinder its popularization, making it difficult to achieve large-scale application in the short term.
• The advantages of Rust can help SVM: SVM uses Rust as a smart contract language to provide a higher-performance and safer development environment. Compared with Solidity, it solves problems such as memory safety and concurrent processing, and is more suitable for high-performance blockchain application development.
• Parallel processing improves network performance: EVM's sequential processing limits network throughput, while SVM uses parallel processing technology to process multiple transactions at the same time, greatly improving network performance and ensuring fast response and low cost during periods of high demand.

In other words, Sonic SVM and SOON are strictly on the same SVM track, and they are not competing products. Sonic SVM targets the performance limitations of Solana, and the final settlement layer is Solana; while SOON will build L2 on top of Ethereum to target the performance bottleneck of Ethereum.

Ecological applications on SOON

Let's remove all infrastructure applications and see what interesting toC applications are on SOON. The biggest direction is in the direction of DeFi;

The SOON official website displays six applications in the DeFi direction, most of which should be native DeFi applications. There are not many followers on the X platform, and its functions can meet most of the needs in the DeFi direction, including Portal Finance (lending agreement), Raptor (AMM), Alita (native DEX), Sponge (staking). The other two are projects with a certain foundation of attention, namely:

EnzoFi is a cross-chain liquidity management center. Its products include lending, bridges, staking and earning, etc. It also has its own points system. It has been launched on Solana, Sui, Eclipse, SOON and Movement, and has 163K followers on the X platform.

Blendy, this is an interesting project: it is a project that specifically uses Meme coins and AI agent-related assets to provide money market services. The collateral is all Meme coins, which is very in line with the current hot topics. It is still in the testnet stage, and the project team announced on Twitter that the number of transactions has exceeded 150,000.

In terms of other applications that users can directly experience, the following four applications on SOON are more interesting:

• Aeronyx: Aeronyx is a SOON-based DePIN protocol that connects millions of devices and tokenizes computing resources, promoting the widespread application of distributed computing.
• Gigentic: Gigentic is a collaboration platform based on SOON, where AI agents can collaborate together and obtain benefits through on-chain mechanisms, building a bridge between humans and AI.
• CoindPay: CoindPay is a multi-functional payment and DeFi application that supports cross-industry payment scenarios based on SOON and provides users with efficient payment solutions.
• Polyquest: Polyquest is a decentralized prediction market where users can predict events on the SOON platform and explore a new model of prediction economy based on blockchain.

Timeline:

On August 27, according to The Block, Solana Optimistic Network (SOON) completed a co-founder round of financing, with Solana Foundation Chairman Lily Liu, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Coinbase Ventures director Jonathan King, and Celestia Labs co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam, Avail co-founder Robinson Burkey, Wormhole Foundation co-founder Robinson Burkey The specific financing amount has not yet been disclosed.

SOON co-builder round, source: SOON

This round of financing is exclusively for co-builders, and no venture capital firms will participate. SOON only has this round of financing news, which means that no venture capital funds have entered SOON's total funds.

On November 8, SOON announced the official launch of a public test network. The test network's performance benchmark is 30,000 TPS and the block time is 50 milliseconds. SOON recommends that all Genesis Hackathon participants migrate their projects to the new public testnet.

On January 3, SOON announced that the Alpha mainnet is now online and announced the SOON token economic model. The initial total supply of SOON is 1 billion (annual inflation is 3%), and the community allocation accounts for 51%. Through fair launch Make allocations. In addition, the ecosystem allocation accounts for 25%, airdrop and liquidity allocation account for 8%, foundation/treasury allocation accounts for 6%, and team and co-builder allocation account for 10%.

SOON Tokenomics, Source: SOON

SOON wrote in the blog published by Alpha mainnet:

The $SOON token distribution follows a fair launch model: there are no pre-> mined tokens, no pre-allocation to the team or private investors, and no special rights or opportunities for venture capital institutions. This distribution method is similar to the infrastructure token issuances of the 2017 ICO era, such as Solana, Polkadot and Avalanche. Everyone can participate in investing at the same time, and the vast majority of tokens will be distributed to builders and the community. More details will be announced next week, so stay tuned!

Eclipse: The earliest SVM to come online, but no tokens were issued

Eclipse is a competitor to SOON and is also SVM L2 released on Ethereum. From the official website, Eclipse is an L2 that focuses on research and ecosystem, and the design is also very stylish. In terms of stage, Eclipse does not lag behind the two competing products mentioned above. The main network has actually been launched, but no tokens have been issued. It is strategically unique. Its overall position is closer to the Ethereum ecosystem and it is pure. "Experience the speed of Solana on Ethereum".

The introduction to Eclipse reads,

Eclipse is Ethereum's first Layer 2 based on Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), which combines the high speed of Solana with the liquidity of Ethereum. This innovative architecture provides users with a high-performance L2 solution that can leverage the rich liquidity of the Ethereum ecosystem while maintaining strict verifiability constraints. Through this design, Eclipse achieves a balance between performance and security, providing strong technical support for decentralized applications.

Eclipse uses Celestia as DA.

A very obvious difference is that Eclipse does not issue its own token, but uses Ethereum as the gas token of the entire L2, which is equivalent to firmly tying itself to the Ethereum chariot. At the same time, Eclipse issued re-pledged Ethereum tokens and used this part to drive L2.

Turbo ETH (tETH) is a unified recollateral token (URT) launched by Eclipse in partnership with Nucleus, aiming to integrate the most profitable protocols on Ethereum into a simple and easy-to-use default yield token. tETH provides a convenient way for users to earn restaking rewards while eliminating liquidity fragmentation and complex operations.

Users can mint tETH by depositing five liquid heavily collateralized tokens (LRT), including WETH, weETH, ezETH, rswETH, apxETH, and pufETH. The design of tETH not only spreads risks, but also maximizes user rewards through its unified revenue mechanism, bringing a new liquidity management tool to users on the chain.

tETH is a token with exchange rate gains, similar to Compound's cTokens and Lido's wstETH. Its ETH-based gains will increase the exchange rate over time, while non-ETH rewards can be claimed through a separate interface.

As of the date of publication, according to DeFiIlama data, the TVL of the entire Eclipse chain has reached $19.33 million, which is not very high. The number of followers on the X platform is 195,000.

Eclipse ecosystem

In terms of the DeFi ecosystem, the largest DEX on Eclipse is Orca, with a current TVL of US$9.2 million. The TVL of the second-ranked lending protocol Save is US$3.55 million, and the TVL of the second largest DEX Invariant is US$3.25 million. These data have all increased significantly in the past month.

Let’s look at consumer applications. The following are the most popular applications of the X platform in the Eclipse ecosystem:

• After School Club: an NFT series and the first NFT of Eclipse;
• SEND Arcade, a platform where you can earn ETH by playing games;
• Dscvr.one, a social protocol, has about 80,000 followers on the X platform;
• HedgeHog: a prediction market also on Solana;
• AllDomains: Eclipse domain name service;
• Moonlaunch.fun: Pump.fun on Eclipse;
• Blobscriptions: Inscriptions on Eclipse.

Timeline:

According to news in September 2022, Eclipse announced the completion of US$15 million in Pre-Seed and seed round financing at a valuation of more than 100 million US dollars. The US$9 million in seed round financing was jointly led by Tribe Capital and Tabiya, with Caballeros Capital, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Soma Capital, Struck Capital and CoinList participated in the investment; the other US$6 million was a Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Polychain Capital, and Tribe Capital, Tabiya, Galileo, Polygon Ventures, The House Fund and Accel participated in the investment. It is reported that Eclipse is responsible for developing a customizable Rollup provider, aiming to become a "universal Layer 2" platform compatible with multiple L1 blockchains.

In February 2023, Eclipse launched SVM, a scaling solution around Solana, allowing applications to be compatible with Polygon. With this solution, dApps built for the Solana blockchain can be migrated through Polygon SVM or become multi-chain, which can open the door to communities using and building on different blockchains.

In December 2023, the Eclipse testnet will be made public;

In March 2024, Eclipse Labs announced the completion of a US$50 million Series A financing, co-led by Placeholder and Hack VC, bringing the total financing to US$65 million. The round also attracted participation from investors such as RockTree Capital, Polychain Capital, Delphi Digital, Maven 11, DBA, Apollo-managed funds, Fenbushi Capital, ParaFi Capital, as well as strategic investments from Flow Traders, GSR, Auros and OKX Ventures. Numerous researchers and developers participated in its angel round of investment, including Barnabé Monnot (Ethereum Foundation), John Adler (Celestia Labs), Austin Federa (Solana Foundation), ZachXBT and Meltem Demirors.

In May 2024, Eclipse founder and CEO Neel Somani resigned due to sexual harassment rumors and was replaced by Vijay Chetty. Chetty will be promoted to chief growth officer and assume all the responsibilities of the CEO. Chetty has over a decade of cryptocurrency native experience and has held leadership roles at Uniswap Labs, dYdX Trading, and Ripple Labs in addition to her investment experience at BlackRock.

In July 2024, the Eclipse developer mainnet will be made public;

In September 2024, Eclipse announced the launch of the re-pledge token tETH, powered by Nucleus.

In November, Eclipse announced that Ben Livshits had joined the team and served as chief technology officer. Ben holds a PhD from Stanford University and has more than 20 years of research experience, having worked at Intel, Microsoft, Brave and Matter Labs.

In the same month, the Eclipse mainnet was launched.