"0.04 seconds to trade execution"... Solayer dreams of a real-time financial platform [Coin Interview]

Interview with Joshua Sum, Solayer Product Head

Immediate settlement implemented through hardware acceleration

Expansion to tokenized stock and ETF trading

"Goal is an institution-only execution layer"

Solayer, a layer 1 (L1) blockchain aiming for real-time finance by implementing millisecond (ms)-level settlements, has moved to build next-generation payment infrastructure through hardware-based scaling.

Joshua Sum, Solayer's product head, told BloomingBit in an interview on the 24th that "the next stage of blockchain scaling will come from hardware," and "to realize real-time finance, the payment infrastructure itself must be redesigned."

"Software scaling has limits…the next solution is hardware"

At the recent Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW), Solayer unveiled an alpha version of its permissioned mainnet and showcased a high-performance blockchain infrastructure aimed at millisecond (ms)-level settlements.

Sum said, "We aim to raise blockchain transaction speed and throughput through hardware acceleration," and explained, "there are limits to fundamentally increasing blockchain processing performance with software scaling alone."

Many blockchain projects currently improve scalability with software approaches such as increasing block size or batching transactions. But Sum argued these methods struggle to fundamentally reduce the time to payment finality. To implement 'real-time finance' where execution and settlement occur simultaneously, the current payment structure that relies on human and intermediary involvement must be changed.

He said, "Even a T+0 structure where execution and settlement occur the same day actually takes minutes to hours," adding, "Solayer has built a settlement system on the order of 40 milliseconds that achieves execution and settlement simultaneously."

He continued, "Millisecond-level settlement is a structure where execution and settlement are handled simultaneously by the system without human or intermediary intervention," and "any settlement that is not real-time creates counterparty risk and intermediary costs."

To achieve this, Solayer designed its own extension of the Solana virtual machine (SVM), called InfiniSVM, and combined it with hardware acceleration. The transaction verification, ordering, and execution processes that were sequentially processed in software on general servers are distributed so that high-performance hardware specialized for those computations handles them directly.

Sum said, "Through this approach, Solayer can achieve a transaction throughput (TPS) of over 300,000 transactions per second and finality in under one second," and added, "Although Solayer is compatible with Solana, designing it as L1 rather than layer 2 (L2) was an inevitable decision for real-time settlements."

He explained, "If Solayer had been built as an L2, transactions would need to be rolled up back to Solana (a method of executing transactions off-chain and recording only the resulting values on-chain)," adding, "that would inevitably delay transaction times and would not align with Solayer's goal of immediate payment finality." He also noted, "However, gas fees are designed to be paid to Solana," and "in the long term, we plan to maintain economic alignment with the Solana ecosystem."

Tokenized stock and ETF trading platform 'Spout'... "Real-time settlement possible"

Based on this technology, Solayer launched 'Spout,' a platform that instantly settles tokenized U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Users can trade stocks and ETFs in tokenized form and immediately convert them into stock-based stablecoins.

Sum said, "Technically real-time settlement is now possible, but the biggest challenges are liquidity onboarding and circulation," noting, "Regulation and custody must also be solved for institutional adoption." Currently, Spout applies a 1:1 collateral structure through U.S. custody institutions and access restrictions based on know-your-customer (KYC) procedures.

He said, "Global financial firms such as ONDO and BlackRock are also entering the tokenized asset market. But Solayer is differentiated by being infrastructure designed on the premise of real-time settlement and high-performance throughput," and emphasized, "Our goal is to be the execution layer that institutions and tokenized asset projects need to move large-scale assets on-chain."

He also expressed expectations for the South Korean market, saying, "South Korea is a relatively open market for new financial technologies and on-chain experiments," and "as the product scales, opportunities to collaborate with Korean partners and users will naturally increase."

Su-hyun Lee, BloomingBit reporter shlee@bloomingbit.io