Somnia: A potentially unique high-speed public chain

This article will analyze the following two questions:

1. The market has become desensitized to the concept of "high-speed public chains". Why might Somnia be different?

2. Somnia claims to be the fastest and most cost-effective parallel EVM Layer 1. Is this claim credible?

Overview

Briefly introduce the characteristics and advantages of the Somnia project from three aspects: technology, background, and ecology:

Technical Highlights

• Multi-flow consensus algorithm: Adopts a data chain + consensus chain structure, which is beneficial for preventing MEV, reducing redundancy, lowering costs, and improving efficiency.

• Innovative EVM Compiler: Achieves instruction-level parallelism in EVM, solving congestion issues in high-frequency interaction scenarios.

• Self-developed IceDB database engine: improves data read and write speed and network stability.

• Data compression technology: Improve data transmission efficiency.

Background Advantages

• The development team comes from Improbable, a company founded in 2012, headquartered in London, UK, which has developed software, games, and Web3 metaverse products.

• Secured $270 million in funding from well-known institutions such as MSquared, a16z, SoftBank, and Mirana.

Ecological Progress

• The testnet has already seen the launch of 4 AI/social products, 7 games, 4 NFT projects, and 6 DeFi applications, with an additional 2 AI/social products, 11 games, and 1 DeFi application set to go live soon.

• Since the launch of the testnet in late February 2025 until June 26, 2025, over 100 million blocks have been produced, with an average block production time of 0.1 seconds. A total of 96,878,557 wallet addresses participated, with a transaction volume of 26.43 million in the last day.

The uniqueness of Somnia

• High-frequency interaction: not only pursuing technical indicators, but also focusing on the application of Web3 technology in high-frequency interaction fields such as gaming and socializing.

• The integration of Web3 and Web2: Thanks to its unique background, Somnia is expected to provide Web2 users with a seamless entry into the Web3 world, creating a truly user experience-centric application ecosystem.

Technical In-Depth Analysis

Multi-Flow Consensus Algorithm

Somnia adopts a new multi-stream consensus (MULTISTREAM) algorithm, which includes two parts: the data chain and the consensus chain.

• Data chain: Multiple data chains record transaction information, with each one being managed by a single validator.

• Consensus Chain: Executes consensus, sorts transactions and records transaction references.

Workflow:

1. After the user sends a request, the validator writes the transaction to the data chain.

2. The consensus chain regularly collects the top data shards from each data chain.

3. Validators write the collection of all data shard sets from the top of the data chain into the consensus chain.

4. Validators sort transactions, update states, and synchronize writes to the IceDB database.

Advantages:

• Trade sorting benefits against MEV: uses a deterministic pseudo-random function for sorting, making it difficult to predict and manipulate.

• Reduce redundancy and increase efficiency: Validators record the data chain separately, reducing interaction and storage redundancy.

Instruction-level parallel EVM

To solve the congestion problem of high-frequency related transactions, Somnia has developed an innovative EVM compiler:

• Split the transaction into multiple instruction sets, which can be executed in parallel without conflicts and dependencies.

• Compile EVM bytecode to x86 machine code and utilize CPU multithreading to execute the instruction set in parallel.

Advantages:

• Use standard EVM interpreted execution for regular transactions.

• Enable the EVM compiler for high-frequency trading to achieve hardware-level parallelism and significantly improve efficiency.

IceDB database engine

Using the LSM tree ( Log-Structured Merge-Tree ) data structure to replace traditional Merkle trees:

• Data is appended rather than modified in place, to avoid tampering.

• Faster write speed, no need to calculate hash.

• Create data cache while optimizing read and write, average read and write time 15-100 nanoseconds.

Features:

• Generate read and write performance reports to provide a deterministic basis for Gas calculations.

data compression technology

• Achieve high compression based on the power law theory of information quantity and frequency distribution.

• Stream compression enhances network transmission capability.

• Use BLS signatures to improve the speed of signature transmission and verification.

• The multi-flow consensus design ensures balanced and stable network transmission capacity.

Conclusion

Somnia, as a project that spans Web2 and Web3, is expected to provide infrastructure support for the integration of Web3 and Web2. Its technological innovations contribute to the realization of high-frequency interactive applications, such as gaming, social networking, and the metaverse. As the integration of Web3 and Web2 becomes a new trend, Somnia's development is worth paying attention to. In the future, we may see a new ecosystem that retains all the benefits of Web3 while not sacrificing the smooth experience of Web2 applications.