What Is SVM, And Why Is It So Important for Web3 Gaming?

When Bitcoin was first developed, it was not designed for any type of active ecosystem. Seeing the tremendous potential in a blockchain-driven industry of applications, Ethereum was created to allow for developers to build on a system with more speed, more scalability, and thanks to EVM, a more approachable and standardized method. This has been largely successful for Ethereum, and especially after Ethereum 2.0 solved the major scaling issues, the ecosystem has been a juggernaut in the industry. While this level of speed, cost, and scalability works well enough for some applications, however, it has already shown hard limitations for others. EVM has established itself as the dominant VM for the crypto industry, but this is changing as more platforms are seeing use cases that require high speed, high bandwidth, low cost transactions. Solana has made a name for itself with its outstanding performance, excelling both in raw speed but also in its scalable architecture. It operates at thousands of TPS, while incurring very little gas fees. Another key feature of the chain is that instead of adopting EVM, as many other chains and applications have, Solana completely redesigned the concept of a blockchain VM to create the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), which is key to the network’s speed, scalability, and efficiency. This is excellent news for one of the most demanding Web3 use cases: gaming. While early gaming applications placed only the smallest elements of the game on-chain, such as assets and transactions, there is an entire untapped market for entirely on-chain gaming. To have a large multiplayer game, completely on-chain and hosting thousands of players at once, would take an extraordinary amount of infrastructure to support. Solana’s scalability is built with this type of far-reaching vision in mind, and L2’s such as Sonic are already building what is needed to make this vision a reality. Let’s dive into exactly what SVM is, why it matters, and how it will change the gaming industry.

While this isn’t meant to be a whitepaper, it’s important to understand some of the technical details behind SVM to understand why it is fundamental to Solana’s scalability, and how it is so much better designed than EVM for this purpose. For blockchains, a virtual machine acts as an individual runtime environment whose purpose is to execute smart contracts onto a chain. Through the various apps on the chain, transactions are requested. These transactions are given to the VM, which processes them by using the smart contract instructions to modify the blockchain’s state. Because it is the validators that actually approve through consensus and approve the state, the VM converts the smart contract language (Rust and C/C++on Solana) into BPF, and these instructions are sent to each of the Solana validators. Each validator runs their own instance of the SVM, and as consensus is reached and transactions are validated, these changes in the state of the blockchain are updated across all SVM instances. The system’s architecture of redundancies and decentralization protects from corrupt code and attacks, but requires efficient processing in order to be scalable. This is where SVM differs so greatly from EVM. While EVM handles transactions sequentially, eliminating the ability to scale efficiently. SVM uses a method they’ve named Sealevel, which will first examine all transaction requests at a given time, then separate out those that do not conflict with any others. These are allowed to run in parallel, vastly speeding up the process and resolving the majority (typically) of transactions. The remaining transactions are handled sequentially to ensure conflicts do not occur. This creates significant scalability capacity for Solana, allowing the network to handle massive amounts of transactions as it grows. The other component to this is that the SVM is by design slightly heavier for hardware than EVM is, using a multi-threaded runtime environment to process more than one contract at a time. Where EVM uses as little of the validator hardware as possible, SVM uses what is available in order to maximize the speed and efficiency of the network. Validators put more computational effort in at once, but the result is a much more capable network. One more key feature from this architecture is Solana’s ability to develop localized fee markets, where fees can be assigned per smart contract, a fundamental change from Ethereum’s global market, where a transaction in one area of the network will affect transactions in completely different areas, even though they aren’t related. Shoring up this control and predictability will be as critical for many use cases as improving scalability.

Given all this, the implications for on-chain gaming become obvious. It’s not often that you find a solution that is better, faster, and cheaper. But when you get that solution by reimagining how the foundation of a blockchain architecture should be designed, it is indeed possible. Solana has excelled in this, and as a result we are already starting to see the early stages of truly on-chain gaming. The leading SVM chain in this arena is very likely Sonic. It has major traction, having launched its Odyssey testnet and already sporting 500M transactions as it builds to mainnet. This platform is designed to enable sovereign game economies for the Solana ecosystem, connecting the games to the native composability of Solana while allowing them to have freedom in their customizability and scale. In order to serve as many games as possible, Sonic has developed an integration that allows it to be EVM compatible, meaning that Web3 games built on EVM can be onboarded and integrated into the larger Solana ecosystem, gaining the benefits of Solana’s speed, scale, and low cost.

With Sonic and other SVM chains building capabilities for Web3 gaming, it will likely only be a year or two before there is a sharp rise in on-chain, even fully-on-chain gaming in Web3. When it hits, it will likely cause another Web3 renaissance of new ideas and use cases, and may even bring in some of the major gaming houses to develop their own on-chain gaming experiences. This will be much different than the limited P2E fad, and certainly different from the NFT bubble. On-chain gaming has massive implications and a staggering number of use cases. The only limitation is technology, and the Solana SVM is closing that gap quickly.