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The Limits of Software Scaling

Blockchain scalability has evolved through sharding, Layer 2 rollups, and parallel execution models. While these innovations have improved performance, they also introduce state fragmentation, liquidity inefficiencies, and increased complexity.

Software optimizations like transaction batching and concurrency improvements have reached their limits due to:

  • State Fragmentation: Rollups and sidechains create isolated liquidity pools, increasing transaction costs and reducing efficiency.
  • Throughput Bottlenecks: EVM’s single-threaded execution and Solana’s Sealevel parallelism face network bandwidth constraints.
  • Latency & Cost: Congestion leads to high fees and delays, even with rollup improvements like Proto-Danksharding.
  • System Complexity: New execution models (e.g., DAGs, Block-STM) improve efficiency but increase synchronization overhead.

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Why Hardware Scaling Is the Future

To overcome these constraints, hardware acceleration provides a new approach, offloading key blockchain processes to dedicated hardware accelerators.

  • Signature Verification: FPGA-based signature verification (e.g., Firedancer) processes transactions at 100Gb/s.
  • Parallel Processing: FPGA clusters enable horizontal scaling, executing transactions across multiple machines.
  • Low-Latency Storage: NVMe-oF allows distributed state storage without compromising speed.
  • Network Efficiency: InfiniBand RDMA enables ultra-fast inter-node communication, supporting 1M+ TPS.

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Solayer InfiniSVM: Pushing Blockchain to the Hardware Limit

Solayer InfiniSVM integrates hardware acceleration, RDMA, and FPGA-based execution to eliminate software constraints. By optimizing transaction processing, state storage, and consensus execution at the hardware level, Solayer achieves unprecedented scalability, ultra-low latency, and reduced costs.

The future of blockchain is not just in better code—it’s in better hardware.

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