With the support of hardware, how does Solayer use RDMA to achieve 340,000 TPS?
I heard that Solayer launched the InfiniSVM Devnet, and it threw out the usable test environment with a peak of 340,000+ TPS? Truth be told, when the Solana ecosystem is still at 4,000 TPS and PumpFun users are still suffering from transaction failures, Solayer's solution is not a gradual optimization, but a direct leap of magnitude.
Where is the confidence behind this?
1) The confidence of InfiniSVM first comes from an industry reality: the pure software optimization route is close to the limit, and the hardware acceleration is at the right time.
In the past few years, blockchain performance improvements have mainly relied on architectural innovations – from Bitcoin's UTXO to Ethereum's account model, from PoW to PoS, from single chain to L1+Layer2 modular stacking, all of which are breakthroughs at the software level. But now the road is getting narrower and narrower.
The reason why most of the high-performance chains are stuck on the threshold of 10,000-level TPS stems from this.
The 160,000 TPS claimed by Aptos is a theoretical value most of the time, and it is difficult for Sui to continue to run full in practical applications, because of the physical bottleneck under the general hardware architecture.
Hardware limitations such as traditional CPU serial processing, network I/O latency, and memory access overhead are becoming the biggest barriers to performance improvement.
The RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) hardware acceleration route chosen by InfiniSVM essentially bypasses the CPU bottleneck and allows nodes to communicate directly with each other at the memory level. In addition, InfiniSVM also introduces a multi-actuator parallel processing model to work with SDN (Software Defined Networking) for real-time traffic optimization. These are the possibilities of finding new breakthroughs from the hardware level, and they are also an important turn in the development of the industry.
2) InfiniSVM is fully compatible with the Solana Virtual Machine, which makes migrating to InfiniSVM basically a matter of "changing RPC endpoints" for developers who are already deeply involved in the Solana ecosystem. The commercial value of this compatible design is self-evident. Traditional blockchains are limited by the TPS cap, and many application scenarios can only stay in the concept stage. For example, high-frequency algorithmic trading, real-time game state synchronization, etc. The confirmation finality of InfiniSVM (0.01 second confirmation time) is a breakthrough in many application scenarios: real-time interaction in chain games, millisecond-level settlement in DEXs, and high-frequency automated transactions with AI Agent. This is key to breaking through the limitations of current Solana application scenarios.
3) The hybrid POAS adopted by InfiniSVM, the consensus model tries to find a balance between performance and decentralization. Daily transactions are processed quickly through the validator network, and the Solana mainnet is used as the final arbitration in case of disputes or anomalies, which is quite pragmatic in the design idea of "fast lane + insurance mechanism".
In fact, this design idea is not new - Polygon's early designs, various sidechain schemes, had a similar logic. The problem is that hardware acceleration solutions will naturally push up the threshold for node operation, and although RDMA and InfiniBand technologies have strong performance, the cost and technical complexity will also increase accordingly, and they are bound to have the same problem of "centralization" of the verification node network as most high-performance chains.
The logic is realistic: since the hardware-accelerated route will inevitably lead to a centralized network of validators, borrow a full-fledged decentralized network as the ultimate security. It's like layering the requirements of "performance" and "security" – InfiniSVM for extreme performance and Solana for ultimate security.
Above. It should be noted that Devnet is still in the internal testing stage at this stage, the blockchain state will be reset from time to time, and the network data may be intermittently unstable, which indicates that there is still a lot of engineering work to be done before it is ready for production. Especially when really facing the ultimate pressure of 1 million + TPS.
In general, InfiniSVM represents an important direction shift in blockchain infra - from software optimization to hardware acceleration, from theoretical innovation to engineering implementation. (As shown in the figure below, there are nearly 100,000 real-time TPS)
