While there continue to be what seems to be daily innovations in the Web3 space, the industry is dealing with a crisis of its own making.  What started as a very simplistic idea, where blockchain could hold data on a transparent, immutable chain, has turned into an industry worth hundreds of billions.  The “crisis” is that Web3 has progressed so rapidly from the original goal of blockchain that it is starting to resemble Web2, but with additional benefits.  This is great news, of course, but presents a problem: the scalability issues long since solved on Web2 through broadband internet, but still present in Web3.  There are many reasons why this problem is still an issue for Web3, but namely it is difficult to enjoy all the benefits of Web3, such as decentralization, transparency where you want it and privacy where you don’t, and the ability to utilize borderless currency, without the solution becoming incredibly more complex.

The industry has been working at a fever pitch to solve these scalability problems, and many breakthroughs have occurred in just the last few years.  Ethereum has seen major success with the EVM architecture, and its ecosystem continues to expand as a result.  However, Solana’s own virtual machine, the SVM architecture, has created a major focus on the chain as it provides one of the first parallelized virtual machines that can actually work at scale.  While Solana itself can already provide thousands of transactions per second with very low fees, this type of rollup can exponentially improve these figures.  Let’s explore why SVM is so powerful and what we can expect to see emerge in the near future, including those with high-performance needs like Sonic and other gaming-based platforms.

SVM:  Untold Scalability

The Solana ecosystem has a number of key advantages that indicate it is a growing player among the Web3 top tier chains.  There are already thousands of active developers working on Solana, with new platforms launching at a regular pace.  In terms of money, the ecosystem is biting at the heels of giants like Ethereum, with DEXs processing over $60 billion in March 2024.  This, combined with more mainstream financial institutes like PayPal and Visa building on the platform, give strong indications that the big players are taking Solana seriously.

To get to mass adoption, however, Solana (and the rest of Web3) need to increase performance levels to what users currently expect in Web2.  This is difficult, because these expectations are extremely high.  Users on Web2 platforms make purchases, trade currency, stream content, and even play resource-heavy games at high quality, all without incident.  The expectation is that nearly any activity can be performed online with no loss of signal, no wait, and no issues.  Yes, sometimes issues do happen, but they create major frustration as a result.  Our expectation is that things work well, work nearly all the time, and the cost of them working is free.  “Gas fees” were not part of the Web2 vocabulary, so the expectation of network usage cost is 0.

With such high expectations, even a high capacity network like Solana must push even harder to make these expectations a reality.  This is where SVM capability steps in, allowing for massive increases in performance, and a more localized ecosystem by developers.

Atomic Interoperability Closes the Gap

The final piece of the puzzle for this level of scalability is atomic interoperability.  This is where Web2 and Web3 diverge the most, because also Web2 interoperability is expected, it’s the power of Web3 assets that create the need for atomic transactions.  When buying, selling, swapping, etc., it is critical to evolve beyond having to trust the other party to complete a transaction in good faith, or to rely on a trusted third party to facilitate.  The desired speed of Web3 is too high for a trusted party to add a step, and the ultimate goal of any online, global system is a completely trustless environment.  Anything less, and weaknesses become exploited.

Atomic interoperability combined with the other benefits of SVM create a strong foundation for new use cases.  One of the most taxing use cases is fully on-chain gaming, and platforms like Sonic, which recently raised $12M in a series A funding round, are building with SVM to create an independent ecosystem that still benefits from Solana’s base layer services and liquidity.  The full benefits of the SVM architecture are on display with a use case like Sonic because it pushes all the performance boundaries:  extremely high TPS, minimal cost that it can control, atomic interoperability to interact with other platforms, a sandbox environment for its developers, and full monetization infrastructure to handle traffic, transactions, and other settlements that its games might need.  So far this use case has shown tremendous promise for what Solana’s vision is, and Sonic’s active testnet is verifying the results.

What’s Next?

If Solana’s innovations are any indication, the Web3 industry is well on the path to mass adoption as it closes out this gap and brings the performance expectations of Web2, while at the same time bringing these key Web3 features such as decentralization, the ability to manage via a DAO, borderless transactions and liquidity, and the ultimate ability to create entire digital economies for gamers, traders, shoppers, and anyone else who would like to participate.  If the last few years are any indication, the next few years should see an incredible transformation of Web3 becoming an integral part of daily life.