What is Solayer (LAYER)?

By CMC AI
09 February 2026 09:47PM (UTC+0)
TLDR

Solayer is a blockchain infrastructure project that began as a restaking platform on Solana and is evolving into a hardware-accelerated, high-performance blockchain called InfiniSVM, designed for real-time financial applications.

  1. Evolving Infrastructure – It started as Solana's first restaking network and is now building InfiniSVM, a Layer 1 blockchain targeting over 1 million transactions per second (TPS).

  2. Core Technology – Its architecture uses hardware offloading and specialized networks to achieve near-zero latency and sub-second finality for demanding use cases.

  3. Token Utility – The LAYER token is the network's native asset, used for governance, treasury management, and will facilitate future functions like staking and gas fees.

Deep Dive

1. Purpose & Value Proposition

Solayer's core mission is to solve blockchain scalability and latency limitations for real-world, high-frequency applications. Initially, it addressed capital efficiency within the Solana ecosystem by becoming its first restaking platform, allowing users to stake SOL or liquid staking tokens (LSTs) to secure additional services and earn rewards (Solayer Foundation).

Its vision expanded in 2025 with the introduction of InfiniSVM, aiming to be the first blockchain capable of over 1 million TPS. The goal is to enable use cases like high-frequency trading, real-time payments, and AI-driven systems where traditional blockchain batch processing is too slow (CoinMarketCap).

2. Technology & Architecture

Solayer's technological leap is embodied in InfiniSVM, a hardware-accelerated blockchain. It offloads key components to programmable chips (like FPGAs) and leverages high-speed networking technologies such as InfiniBand and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). This approach is designed to drastically increase network bandwidth and reduce latency.

The architecture is fully compatible with the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), allowing developers to port applications with minimal code changes. By separating transaction sequencing from block verification, it aims to balance ultra-high performance with decentralization. A recent $35 million ecosystem fund aims to accelerate the development of applications that require this level of performance (CoinDesk).

Conclusion

Solayer is fundamentally an ambitious infrastructure project transitioning from a Solana-specific restaking service to a foundational, hardware-optimized blockchain built for the latency-sensitive future of finance. Will its extreme performance claims translate into sustainable, real-world adoption beyond speculative trading?

CMC AI can make mistakes. Not financial advice.