What is Solayer (LAYER)?

Deep Dive

1. Purpose & Evolution

Solayer's primary mission is to solve blockchain scalability for latency-sensitive use cases like high-frequency trading and real-time payments. It originated in 2024 as the first restaking and liquid restaking protocol on Solana, allowing users to stake SOL or liquid staking tokens (LSTs) to earn additional yield while securing the network (Solayer Foundation). By 2025, its thesis expanded to building InfiniSVM, a dedicated layer-1 blockchain that leverages hardware acceleration to achieve its performance goals.

2. Technology: InfiniSVM

The project's key technical innovation is the InfiniSVM architecture. It is designed to "infinitely scale" the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) by offloading critical blockchain components onto dedicated, programmable hardware chips (like FPGAs). This approach, combined with high-speed networking technologies such as InfiniBand, RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), and SDN (Software-Defined Networking), aims to deliver over 1 million TPS and 100 Gbps+ bandwidth with sub-second finality (CoinMarketCap). This hardware-offloading model is central to its claim of being the first blockchain of its kind.

3. Tokenomics & Utility

The LAYER token has a maximum supply of 1 billion. Its utility is designed to align with the project's growth phases (Solayer Foundation). At launch, its primary function is governance, allowing holders to vote on protocol upgrades and ecosystem grants. Future utilities, dependent on network development, are planned to include using LAYER for gas fees on the InfiniSVM network and for participating in a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to earn block rewards.

Conclusion

Solayer is fundamentally a scalability-focused blockchain project that bridges the concept of restaking security with cutting-edge hardware acceleration to enable a new class of real-time on-chain applications. Will its hardware-first approach prove to be the key to mainstream adoption for high-frequency use cases?