The Solana scaling startup Sonic SVM is looking to show what it can do for decentralized application builders following the launch of its Mobius mainnet, which is up and running today.
Mobius is the first-ever Solana Virtual Machine or SVM chain, designed to enhance Solana’s already-impressive performance with a dedicated Layer-2 network for high volume decentralized applications to scale.
With Mobius up and running, Sonic says it will become a “seamless extension” of Solana, similar to how L2s like Polygon and Arbitrum serve Ethereum-based dApps. Developers can migrate their Solana-based dApps without making any code changes, while retaining all of the features they’ve become accustomed to on Solana.
Their gas fees will continue to be paid in SOL tokens, meaning no disruption for their end users, only benefits. Those fees will be cheaper, transactions will be faster, and dApps will be able to perform better while serving greater numbers of users than before.
Sonic, which is backed by more than $12 million in venture capital and community funding, wants to become the heart of Solana’s nascent gaming ecosystem. Its L2 infrastructure is primarily focused on gaming, and indeed, it refers to its L2 networks as “game-specific rollups”, which bundle applications up to process them off-chain at far greater speeds than the native Solana chain can do.
It’s targeting gaming because, while Solana has already made its presence felt in the DeFi industry, it has not made the same progress in GameFi, due to intense competition from game-specific blockchains such as Oasys and Immutable X.
But by leveraging the Solana SVM and its own capabilities such as the horizontal scaling framework HyperGrid, Sonic believes it can outperform those rivals. In addition, its native compatibility with Solana’s thriving ecosystem means it has access to much greater liquidity.
For end users, they’ll notice some immediate benefits, including gas fees that are around 50% lower on average compared with the Solana chain, plus millisecond-level RPC response times when querying historical blockchain data for analytics purposes or trading signals.
Sonic also notes that the Mobius mainnet is fully compatible with all of Solana’s core protocols, including Hyperlane, Metaplex and Pyth, ensuring developers have everything they need to tap into the wider Web3 ecosystem.
The main advantage of building on Sonic is that game developers will be able to fully customize their L2 networks to ensure a seamless experience for every player.
Sonic SVM co-founder and Chief Executive Chris Zhu said Mobius has already onboarded over eight million users and dozens of games and other dApps during its testnet phase.
“This milestone represents the collaborative effort of not just our team, but a cohort of partners across the Solana ecosystem – from infrastructure providers and dApp builders to the Solana Foundation and community leaders like Superteam,” he said.
Besides targeting gaming, Sonic SVM also sees its networks as a great option for developers of DeFi and SocialFi applications, as well as NFT creators. Another plus for Sonic SVM is that HyperGrid makes it possible for Ethereum developers to create EVM dApps in familiar programming languages that can execute and settle their transactions on Solana.
In an effort to grow its community, Sonic SVM is currently hosting a $1 million hackathon event, incentivizing developers to build AI applications, DeFi applications and more.
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