SVM Arms Race: The Battle of the Top Students among Solayer, SOON, and Sonic SVM

With the continuous development of blockchain technology, the innovation of execution environments has become the focus of industry attention. In this technological transformation, the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) is gradually turning the vision of high concurrency, low latency, and cross-chain compatibility into reality through the three projects Sonic, SOON, and Solayer.

In 2025, the Solana ecosystem urgently needs new narratives to drive development. The three leading players in the SVM ecosystem are attempting to solve the ultimate challenges facing the industry through their unique technological paths. This article will delve into the logic behind this SVM arms race from three dimensions: underlying architecture, ecological strategy, and market positioning.

The Importance of SVM in 2025

In recent years, the narrative of "Ethereum killers" has gradually faded from people's sight. Simply copying the EVM architecture and increasing TPS is no longer sufficient to meet the evolutionary needs of Web3. According to developer reports, EigenLayer, Aptos, and Solana are the top three cryptocurrency ecosystems with the fastest growth in new developers in 2024.

Although Ethereum remains the largest developer ecosystem across continents, Solana has become the preferred choice for new developers. This shift reflects a profound change in the industry's perception: the competition in blockchain has shifted from a "battle of narratives" to a "revolution of execution environments." After the SVM architecture upgrade is completed and a large number of new developers are attracted, it is expected to reconstruct the entire technological paradigm of the smart contract execution layer.

SVM is the execution environment for handling transactions, smart contracts, and programs on the Solana network, specifically designed to address scalability and user experience issues. Compared to the traditional EVM, SVM offers faster transaction speeds and lower Gas fees. Most importantly, SVM supports parallel transaction processing, enabling it to maintain high efficiency and low costs during periods of high demand.

As the Solana ecosystem nurtures SVM, and Sui and Aptos build MoveVM, the core battleground of the next generation blockchain war is shifting from the consensus layer to innovations in execution environments. The development of SVM is not only a technological advancement but also an extension of Solana's influence.

The Technical Path and Ecological Ambition of the SVM Trio

SOON: The community movement of SVM

SOON is positioned more like a "community movement within SVM," prioritizing closeness to the community in its construction and completing financing through rounds of co-builders and a community fair launch model. SOON's goal is to bring SVM to all L1s, not relying on the Solana mainnet, but instead providing flexible scaling capabilities through the SOON Stack.

This design allows any L2 of public chain ecosystems to enjoy the advantages of SVM, including faster transaction speeds and lower Gas fees. SOON faces an execution environment that is different from other SVM projects, requiring higher performance Rollup and technical stack support.

The localization fee market design of SOON is more considerate, avoiding the issues caused by the "global charging model" like that of Ethereum. The project has received support from well-known project co-founders and has allocated most of the tokens to the community, demonstrating its emphasis on community opinions.

From the perspective of project progress, the development speed of SOON is the fastest among the SVM trio. Its design not only addresses the issues of EVM and Solana but also achieves a win-win situation in terms of user experience and efficiency.

Solayer: Balancing TVL and Efficiency

The narrative shifts of Solayer over the past year can be described as textbook-level, from "re-staking protocols" to "RWA stablecoins" and then to "hardware-accelerated SVM", each time accurately grasping market trends. The founding team combines product and technical intuition, and the acquisition of Fuzzland to strengthen chain security reflects its strong execution ability.

Solayer initially focused on staking on Solana, aiming to become the "EigenLayer of Solana." However, with the acquisition of technology company FuzzLand and the creation of Solayer InfiniSVM, Solayer has embarked on a new layout, aiming to become the first public chain to implement hardware-accelerated expansion solutions.

The 2025 roadmap of Solayer proposes "Infiniband RDMA technology", aiming to achieve a performance of one million TPS and 100 Gbps. Its hardware acceleration solution aims to achieve a transaction confirmation time of 1 millisecond by offloading key operations to specialized hardware components.

In the Solayer Chain, transactions first enter a scalable entry cluster composed of a large number of nodes for preprocessing, and then are finalized by a sorter built with Intel Tofino switches and FPGAs. This design ensures both efficiency and the ability to handle special cases.

Sonic SVM: The Breakthrough Engine for Blockchain Game Infrastructure

Sonic SVM is the first project to complete TGE in the SVM track, focusing on high concurrency and instant transaction demands in gaming scenarios. Its technology is based on the HyperGrid framework, aiming to achieve high customization and scalability while maintaining native composability with Solana.

HyperGrid supports developers in writing applications in the EVM environment, but ultimately executes on Solana, significantly reducing the learning cost for developers. Sonic SVM is the first Grid instance in the HyperGrid framework, similar to the relationship between Virtuals and Luna.

The Guardian Nodes system of Sonic focuses on verifying on-chain user behavior, effectively preventing bot attacks and malicious activities, providing players with a safer interactive environment. In addition, Sonic has achieved seamless account abstraction through the TikTok Mini App - SonicX, leveraging TikTok's large user base, which significantly lowers the entry threshold for Web3.

Conclusion

The three major projects in the SVM track each have their own characteristics: Sonic SVM focuses on gaming experience and user flow; Solayer is dedicated to improving high-performance efficiency; SOON is community-centered, extending SVM to the entire blockchain world. This SVM arms race not only reflects the market's demand for redefining infrastructure but also showcases the relentless efforts of blockchain technology in pursuing "speed, low cost, and high experience." As user demands continue to rise, SVM innovation will play an increasingly important role in the future blockchain ecosystem.