Say you have a single server that accepts and processes requests for your application. As the application gets more users, there’s a need to scale (increase the capacity of the server to receive more requests). And usually, you’d do it in two ways;

• Add more resources like RAM or upgrade the server CPU (Vertical scaling).

• Add more servers to handle more requests (Horizontal scaling).

This is also applicable to Blockchain networks. Blockchain networks like Ethereum and Solana receive and store information about transactions. As these networks grow in popularity, they face difficulties in processing transactions quickly and efficiently (scalability), which often leads to higher transaction fees and a longer confirmation time.

This article explores existing networks’ approaches to scalability and how Solayer Chain, a blockchain architecture that aims to improve Solana’s capacity, emerges as the ultimate solution to this problem.

Blockchain scalability

Scalability is a blockchain’s ability to handle an increasing or decreasing number of transactions without sacrificing security.

It is a crucial factor in blockchain because the size and complexity of the network grow with each transaction added to the chain. When a network cannot handle the transaction load, it results in slow processing times and a poor user experience.

Scalability affects the number of network nodes and the amount of transactions the network can handle, how quickly the network can handle transactions, and other factors. Scalability problems are challenges encountered in handling an increasing amount of transactions.

To manage these problems, Blockchains like Ethereum and Solana have explored different approaches. Let’s dive in.

Traditional Scaling Approaches

Scaling Ethereum

Ethereum is the second largest network after Bitcoin. According to Etherscan, the network has processed up to 1.9 million daily transactions and up to 2.6 billion all-time transactions at a processing rate of 15tps.

This high demand leads to slower transactions and expensive gas prices, Increasing the network capacity is crucial for its mass adoption.

Over the years, several scaling solutions have emerged to help increase transaction speed and throughput (number of transactions per second) on Ethereum. Layer 2 solutions like Rollups, sidechains etc. have emerged, but often, these solutions have to handle transactions off the Ethereum mainnet, causing fragmentation.

To understand this approach better, say a 12-seater bus called Ethereum had to take people to a certain destination. And because Ethereum is a popular and trusted transport firm, more passengers decided to join them. But unfortunately, the 12-seater bus could not contain everyone, some passengers would either have to wait or pay more to join the bus first.

To curb this problem, they hired more 12-seater buses (Starknet, Optimism etc.), so everyone can move at the same time. But the problem with this? Only the Ethereum bus can get to the final destination, so each passenger would eventually have to join at some point, and they’d have to pay the hired buses their own fare, before moving to the Ethereum bus, because, though they all went to the same destination, the buses were managed by different people. This causes inconvenience and more transport fare for the passengers.

Moving back to the blockchain network, performing transactions between two EVM-compatible networks (e.g Startknet to Ethereum) would mean having to move from one independent chain to another, leading to more gas fees.

Scaling Solana

Solana is the 3rd most popular network after Bitcoin and Ethereum. But happens to be the fastest with a throughput of up to 5000 tps (transactions per second) and the lowest transaction rate. It’s no surprise it claimed the top spot for the developers’ ecosystem.

With hundreds of decentralized applications and tokens launching daily on the network, Solana still manages to process the fastest transaction rates with the lowest gas fee, while maintaining its security.

So how is Solana able to achieve this?

Unlike the Ethereum virtual machine which executes transactions in sequence, the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) Proof-Of-History (POH) architecture ensures that transactions read and write operations are predetermined before execution. This enables transactions to execute efficiently in parallel across available CPU cores without conflicts.

Despite Solana’s network efficiency, it still has a problem of hardware limitations. To keep pace with current throughput, its validators require high-end hardware components like CPUs exceeding 3.1GHz, more than 2.5TB of RAM, etc.

Introducing Solayer Infinisvm

Solayer SVM is a blockchain architecture powered by InfiniBand technology, and designed to scale Solana infinitely through hardware acceleration and a Multi-execution model.

Its key components include:

• Hardware offloading and Multi-execution Machine

• Proof-of-Authority-and-stake consensus

Technical Architecture

The above components put together make the Solayer chain infinitely scalable and ultrafast, aiming to achieve up to 1 million tps, with 100Gbps+ network bandwidth

Hardware offloading

With the numerous workloads on SVM daily, Solana validators require higher hardware components to function efficiently.

Fortunately, Solayer infini-s the need for hardware components. Solayer infini-svm utilizes RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) - a high-speed networking technology that allows data to be transferred directly between systems without involving the CPU.

It operates by using a network interface controller (NIC) that supports RDMA, such as InfiniBand or RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet). And performs memory access using dedicated hardware without any CPU intervention or context switches, which decreases the need for CPU usage. This in turn reduces latency (to below microsecond), and increases throughput.

Solayer chain uses the Infiniband network interface controller. Infiband is an implementation of RDMA and a high-performance networking technology designed for supercomputers, data centers, and blockchain nodes. It offers super-low latency (as low as 600 nanoseconds), high data transfer rate (10GBPs to 100GBPs per port).

In Solayer chain, Infiniband ensures that blockchain nodes can communicate faster than traditional networks, transactions can be passed across the network with minimal delay, and data storage and retrieval can be accelerated for shared databases.

Solayer chain also leverages Software-defined Networks (SDN) - a programmable networking approach that separates network control from data forwarding, to optimize transaction flow, improve Load balancing, Reduce network congestion, and Support high transaction throughput.

Solayer Proof-of-Authority-and-stake-Architecture

Traditional Blockchains use either a Proof-Of-Stake (POS) or Proof-of-work (POW) mechanism where transactions are verified by validators who stake on the validation of a transaction.

But there’s a problem, these validators often run out of capacity or find it expensive to access the data layer, which in turn saturates available bandwidth and increases on-chain fees.

The Solayer chain introduces Proof-of-authority-and-stake mechanism. A hybrid consensus model, where the network has 3 participations.

• A sequencer

• Provers

• And solana (as a fallback)

The sequencer (usually a trusted entity), acts as a leader, bundles transactions into shreds, proves stakes, and votes to validate shreds. If a sequencer is corrupt, the sequencer fails to Solana as a fallback consensus. Each transaction batch (shred), created by the sequencer contains transactions, account states, version metadata for accessed accounts, and linked hashes. Provers validate the shred by checking the account state and re-executing transactions.

If 51% of proves approve, the shred is finalized and added to the blockchain. The sequencer proposes invalid or malicious shreds, honest provers can detect and vote against them.

Provers earn transaction fees and rewards in $LAYER token. If a prover votes for invalid transactions, they get slashed and are removed from consensus if they fail to participate.

Solayer (POA+POS) vs Solana (POH) vs Ethereum (POW)

Use Cases of Solayer Chain

Solayer Chain is designed to be infinitely scalable, hardware-accelerated, and user-friendly, making it ideal for high-performance applications. Below are some key use cases of Solayer chain:

Conclusion

Solayer Chain redefines blockchain scalability, efficiency, and usability with a next-generation hardware-accelerated architecture. By leveraging multi-executor parallel processing, InfiniBand RDMA networking, and microservice-driven transaction execution, Solayer Chain pushes performance beyond 1M+ TPS—a level unseen in traditional blockchain systems.