Solana Virtual Machine (SVM): Bitcoin was never intended to have an active ecosystem when it was initially created. After seeing the immense potential in a blockchain-driven applications industry, developers were able to build on a faster, more scalable, and, with the help of EVM, more approachable and standardized method on Ethereum. After Ethereum 2.0 resolved the significant scaling problems, the ecosystem became an industry behemoth, which has been mostly successful for Ethereum.
Speed, cost, and scalability at this level are adequate for some uses but have already proven to be severely limited for others. Since its inception, EVM has been the go-to virtual machine (VM) for the cryptocurrency industry. However, this is starting to change as more platforms encounter use cases that demand fast, cheap transactions.
Solana is well-known for its exceptional performance, which includes lightning-fast processing and a highly scalable architecture. It uses very little gas and runs at thousands of TPS. An additional important aspect of the chain is that, unlike other chains and applications, Solana rethought the idea of a blockchain virtual machine to develop the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). This innovation is crucial to the network’s efficiency, scalability, and speed.
This is fantastic news for the most resource-intensive use case of Web3 gaming. Even though early gaming apps only put assets and transactions on-chain, truly on-chain gaming has vast potential. It would require an enormous amount of infrastructure to support a massively multiplayer game that is entirely on-chain and can host thousands of players simultaneously. Sonic and other L2 developers are hard at work creating the infrastructure that will allow Solana to scale to meet such ambitious goals. So, without further ado, let’s get into SVM, its significance, and how it will revolutionize the gaming industry.
SVM: The Fundamentals
Although this is not a whitepaper, it is necessary to grasp the technical aspects of SVM to comprehend its significance to Solana’s scalability and the reasons why it outperforms EVM in this regard. Virtual machines serve as standalone runtime environments for blockchains, allowing smart contracts to be executed on the chain. Transaction requests are made through the different apps that make up the chain.
The VM receives these transactions and processes them by updating the blockchain according to the instructions provided by the smart contract. Because validators are responsible for consensus and state approval, the VM translates innovative contract languages (Rust and C/C++ on Solana) into BPF and sends these instructions to all the validators in Solana.
When a validator reaches consensus and validates a transaction, their instance of the SVM updates the state of the blockchain, which is then reflected in all of the validators’ instances. Redundancies and decentralization in the system’s architecture prevent attacks and corrupt code, but efficient processing is needed for scalability.
SVM vs EVM
Here, EVM and SVM diverge significantly—the inability to scale efficiently results from EVM’s sequential transaction handling. SVM employs a technique they call Sealevel, which will filter out non-conflicting transaction requests by first looking at all of them at once. These can operate in tandem, significantly reducing processing time and handling most (usually) transactions. To avoid any potential conflicts, the remaining transactions are processed sequentially. This dramatically improves Solana’s scalability, enabling the network to process ever-increasing volumes of transactions.
The second part is that Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) uses a multi-threaded runtime environment to process multiple contracts simultaneously, making it slightly heavier for hardware than EVM. Instead of trying to minimize the use of validator hardware, SVM makes the most of what’s available to optimize the network’s speed and efficiency. While validators do more computation simultaneously, the result is a network with significantly more capability.
In contrast to Ethereum’s global market, which causes unrelated transactions in one part of the network to impact transactions in another, Solana’s capacity to build localized fee markets allows fees to be assigned per smart contract. For many use cases, bolstering this control and predictability is as important as improving scalability.
Road to Scalable, On-Chain Gaming
The consequences of on-chain gaming are apparent in light of all this. It’s not often that a better, faster, and cheaper solution comes along. However, it is feasible when you obtain that solution by rethinking the foundational design of a blockchain architecture. Thanks to Solana’s excellence in this area, the early stages of genuinely on-chain gaming are already visible.
Sonic is probably the best SVM chain out there. Launching its Odyssey testnet, it boasts 500 million transactions as it prepares to launch mainnet, indicating significant traction. By integrating games with Solana’s native composability and giving them creative control over their scalability and customization, this platform aims to facilitate sovereign game economies within the Solana ecosystem. Sonic has made an integration compatible with EVM, so Web3 games built on EVM can be integrated into the larger Solana ecosystem. This way, these games can take advantage of Solana’s speed, scale, and low cost, and Sonic can serve more games.
Final Thoughts
There will probably be a dramatic increase in on-chain, or even entirely on-chain, gaming in Web3 within the next year or two, thanks to Sonic and other SVM chains that are developing capabilities for Web3 gaming. When it launches, it will most certainly spark yet another Web3 renaissance of novel concepts and applications, and it might even entice big-name game developers to create their on-chain games. This will differ highly from the NFT bubble and the limited P2E trend. There are many potential applications and enormous consequences for on-chain gaming. The sole constraint is the state of the art, which the Solana SVM swiftly addresses.