Somnia: A New Type of High-Frequency Interactive Web3 Public Chain

This article will explore two core issues:

1. Why might Somnia still stand out in a market where the concept of "high-speed public chains" has been diluted?

2. Somnia claims to be the fastest and lowest cost parallel EVM Layer 1 public chain. Is this claim credible?

Brief Overview

Summarize the characteristics and advantages of Somnia from three aspects: technology, background, and ecology.

Technical Highlights of Somnia

• Multi-stream consensus algorithm: Separates the data chain and consensus chain, which helps defend against MEV attacks, reduces redundancy, lowers costs, and improves efficiency.

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

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

• Data compression technology: Improve data transmission efficiency

The background advantages of Somnia

• Team Background: The core development team comes from Improbable, a multinational technology company established in 2012, headquartered in London, UK, with involvement in software, gaming, and the Web3 metaverse.

• Financing situation: Received a total of $270 million investment from well-known institutions such as MSquared, a16z, SoftBank, and Mirana.

Somnia's ecological progress

• Ecosystem Map: The testnet has 4 AI/social products, 7 games, 4 NFT projects, and 6 DeFi applications, with 2 AI/social products, 11 games, and 1 DeFi application soon to be launched.

• Ecological Data: Since its launch in late February 2025, as of June 26, 2025, the testnet has generated over 100 million blocks, with an average block time of 0.1 seconds. A total of 96,878,557 wallet addresses participated in the testing, with a transaction volume of 26.43 million in the last 24 hours.

The uniqueness of Somnia

• Focus on high-frequency interaction: not only pursuing technical indicators but also emphasizing the application of Web3 technology in high-frequency interaction scenarios such as gaming and socializing.

• Promote the integration of Web3 and Web2: With a special background, it is expected to provide Web2 users with seamless access to the Web3 world, creating a user experience-centered application ecosystem.

Technical In-depth Analysis

Multi-Stream Consensus Algorithm: Separation of Data Chain and Consensus Chain

Basic Structure

Somnia adopts an innovative multi-stream consensus (MULTISTREAM) algorithm:

• Multiple data chains: record transaction information, each data chain is independently recorded and maintained by a validator.
• Single Consensus Chain: Executes consensus, orders transactions, and records references to transactions, maintained collectively by all validators.

Workflow

1. The user issues a trade request
2. The validator receiving the request will write the transaction to the data chain.
3. The consensus chain periodically collects the top data shards from each data chain.
4. Validators write all the data shard collections at the top of the data chain into the consensus chain.
5. Validators sort transactions, update statuses, and synchronize writes to the IceDB database.

Main Advantages

• Effective defense against MEV attacks: Using a deterministic pseudo-random function for transaction ordering, making it difficult for attackers to predict or influence the ordering results.

• Reduce redundancy and improve efficiency: Validators independently record the data chain without mutual verification; the consensus chain only records snapshots of the data chain and transaction references.

• Reduce costs: Minimized storage and interaction redundancy

Instruction-level parallel EVM

Pain Point: Transaction-level parallelism is difficult to cope with high-frequency related transactions

Traditional trading parallel solutions ( such as Monad and Reddio ) still experience congestion when a large number of related transactions occur simultaneously (, such as large-scale trading of USDC with a certain token, buying NFTs, etc. ).

Somnia's Innovation: Instruction Set Parallelism

• Self-developed EVM compiler: Compiles EVM bytecode into x86 machine code
• Split a single transaction into multiple instruction sets to achieve parallel execution of non-conflicting, dependency-free instruction sets.
• Utilize the multi-threading characteristics of modern CPUs to achieve parallelism at the hardware level.

Advantages

• Regular Trading: Use standard EVM interpretation execution
• High-frequency trading: Enable EVM compiler to achieve instruction set parallelism
• Achieving a balance between cost and efficiency

IceDB database engine

Innovation: Using LSM Trees to Replace Merkle Trees

• Traditional blockchains often use Merkle trees to store data, which requires a large amount of computation.
• IceDB uses LSM tree ( Log-Structured Merge-Tree ), based on log appending writes, without the need to frequently compute hash values.

Main Features

• Faster read and write speeds: average read and write time of 15-100 nanoseconds
• Provide read and write performance reports: to provide a deterministic basis for calculating Gas, achieving a fairer and more effective Gas mechanism.

Data Compression Technology

• Based on the power law theory of information quantity and frequency distribution, achieve high data compression.
• Stream compression enhances network transmission capacity
• Use BLS signatures to accelerate signature transmission and verification
• Multi-stream consensus design makes network transmission more balanced and stable.

Conclusion

Somnia, as a hybrid project transitioning from Web2 to Web3, is expected to bring new possibilities to blockchain with its technological innovations. Core technologies such as multi-stream consensus algorithms, instruction-level parallel EVM, and IceDB database engine enable Somnia to enhance efficiency while reducing costs, making it particularly suitable for high-frequency interactive application scenarios such as gaming, social networking, and the metaverse.

As the integration of Web3 and Web2 becomes a new narrative focus, Somnia, as an underlying infrastructure, is providing technical support for this integration and actively promoting ecosystem development. In the future, we may see a brand new ecosystem that retains all the benefits of Web3 while not sacrificing the smooth experience of Web2 applications.