SVM Arms Race: The Competition Among the Top Students of Solayer, SOON, and Sonic SVM

What will the crypto world look like in a parallel universe where Ethereum achieves 10,000 transactions per second or more in 2025? This assumption seems to be gradually realized through three major projects in the Solana virtual machine (SVM) ecosystem - Sonic, SOON, and Solayer.

In the context where a new narrative for Solana urgently needs to be taken over, these three leading projects in the SVM ecosystem are attempting to solve the industry challenges of "high concurrency, low latency, and cross-chain compatibility" through different technical paths. This article will analyze the underlying logic of this SVM arms race from three aspects: underlying architecture, ecological strategy, and market positioning.

The Importance of SVM in 2025

In recent years, the term "Ethereum killer" has fallen out of favor. Simply copying the EVM architecture and increasing TPS can no longer meet the development needs of Web3. According to reports from data platforms, the cryptocurrency ecosystems with the fastest growth in new developers in 2024 are EigenLayer, Aptos, and Solana, with growth rates of 167%, 96%, and 83%, respectively.

Although Ethereum remains the largest ecosystem across continents, the second-ranked Solana has become the preferred choice for new developers, marking the first time since 2016 that an ecosystem has attracted more new developers than Ethereum.

This change reflects a profound transformation in industry perception: the competition in blockchain has shifted from a "narrative battle" to a "revolution in execution environments." After completing its architectural upgrade and attracting new developers, SVM is expected to reconstruct the entire technical paradigm of smart contract execution layers.

SVM is the execution environment for handling transactions, smart contracts, and programs on the Solana network, specifically designed to address certain scalability and user experience issues. Compared to the traditional EVM, SVM offers faster transaction speeds and lower Gas fees.

SVM supports parallel processing of transactions, unlike EVM which needs to process them one by one. This allows for fast transactions and low fees even during high demand periods.

With the development of SVM in the Solana ecosystem, Sui and Aptos are building MoveVM, and the technological evolution of the crypto ecosystem presents a clear strategic roadmap: the core battleground of next-generation blockchain competition is shifting from the consensus layer to innovations in execution environments. The development of SVM is directly related to the influence of Solana.

The Technical Path and Ecological Ambition of the Three Major SVM Projects

SOON: SVM's Movement

The positioning of SOON is more like "Movement in SVM", prioritizing closeness to the community in its construction, and completing financing through rounds of co-builders and a fair community launch model.

SOON can bring SVM to all L1s: it does not rely on the Solana mainnet, but instead provides flexible scalability through the SOON Stack, allowing SVM to be deployed on other mainstream Layer 1s. This design enables any public chain ecosystem's L2 to enjoy the advantages of SVM, including faster transaction speeds and lower Gas fees.

The localization cost market of SOON is very clever: pricing is based on actual demand and does not interfere with each other. The SOON private placement round attracted co-founders of some well-known projects and allocated 51% of the tokens to NFT buyers, while promptly responding to community opinions.

In terms of actual progress, the development speed of SOON is the fastest among the three major SVM projects. It is not only the "roll king", but its design is also addressing the respective issues of EVM and Solana.

Solayer: Combining TVL and efficiency

In the past year, Solayer's narrative transformation has been exemplary: from "re-staking protocol" to "RWA stablecoin" and then to "hardware-accelerated SVM", each time accurately grasping market trends.

Founder Rachel(, former core developer of Sushiswap), and Jason(, founder of MPCVault), possess both product and technical insights. The acquisition of Fuzzland to strengthen chain security is a testament to this—rapid narrative transformation, strong financing, and high execution ability.

Solayer initially focused on staking on Solana, benchmarking itself as the "Solana version of EigenLayer". However, recently Solayer has started to venture into the SVM technology field.

Solayer has acquired the technology company FuzzLand and jointly created Solayer InfiniSVM, embarking on a new layout with the goal of becoming the first public blockchain to achieve hardware-accelerated scaling solutions.

The 2025 roadmap of Solayer proposes "Infiniband RDMA technology" with the goal of over one million TPS and 100 Gbps. Its hardware acceleration solution offloads critical blockchain operations to dedicated hardware components, responsible for various operations from transaction sorting, scheduling to storage, and aims to achieve a transaction confirmation time of 1 millisecond.

In the Solayer Chain, transactions first enter a scalable entry cluster composed of a large number of nodes, where they are cleansed and pre-executed based on probabilistic predictions of future states. Then, all execution snapshots are sent to a sorter built with Intel Tofino switches and additional FPGAs. Most transactions are already confirmed as valid during the pre-execution stage, requiring no further execution.

Solayer has also gained recognition from some well-known institutions, with two rounds of financing attracting support from investors including certain top institutions.

Sonic SVM: The "circle-breaking engine" for blockchain game infrastructure

Sonic SVM is the earliest project in the SVM track to conduct a token generation event ( TGE ), and it is now listed for spot trading on most mainstream exchanges.

Sonic SVM focuses on the gaming field, with innovative designs primarily targeting the high concurrency and instantaneous transaction demands in gaming scenarios.

Sonic SVM is built on the HyperGrid framework, which is the first concurrent scaling framework for Solana, designed to achieve high customization and scalability while maintaining native composability with Solana.

HyperGrid allows developers to write applications in the EVM environment, but ultimately executes on Solana, with the settlement layer still being Solana. This enables developers to use familiar programming languages to develop projects, reducing the time needed to learn a new public chain.

Sonic SVM is the first Grid instance in the HyperGrid framework. In addition, Sonic's Guardian Nodes system focuses on on-chain user behavior verification, effectively preventing bot attacks and malicious activities, providing a safer interaction environment for gamers.

Another highlight of Sonic is its TikTok mini-program SonicX. With TikTok's massive user base, SonicX generates a wallet linked to the TikTok account through a simple login process, achieving seamless account abstraction. This significantly lowers the entry barrier for Web3, allowing ordinary users to participate in blockchain gaming activities without needing to understand private keys or on-chain operations.

Overall, the three major projects in the SVM track each have their own characteristics:

• Sonic SVM: Focused on optimizing the chain game experience through social platform traffic and seamless on-chain interaction models.
• Solayer: Committed to enhancing efficiency with higher performance, integrating restaking and liquidity optimization to expand the ecosystem.
• SOON: A community-oriented approach to learning Movement will expand SVM to the entire blockchain world.

Conclusion

Behind every successful token launch often lies a renewed demand from the market for the redefinition of infrastructure. From DeFi to blockchain games and social applications, users' demand for "speed, low cost, and high experience" is becoming increasingly strong. In this process, the bottlenecks of traditional EVM are gradually becoming apparent, making the innovation of SVM particularly important.