Solayer

Solayer is a Solana-native restaking protocol and hardware-accelerated Layer 1 blockchain that allows SOL holders to earn additional yield by restaking already-staked assets, while the team builds InfiniSVM — a high-throughput SVM execution environment targeting one million transactions per second.

Origins and Core Restaking Mechanism

Solayer launched in 2024 as a direct analog to Ethereum's EigenLayer concept, applied to Solana's architecture. Rather than using off-chain mechanisms, Solayer implements an Endogenous AVS (Actively Validated Services) model — applications built directly on Solana can secure themselves using restaked SOL, bypassing the need for external trust layers.

Users deposit SOL or supported liquid staking tokens — including mSOL, JitoSOL, bSOL, and INF — into Solayer and receive sSOL in return. sSOL is a Liquid Restaking Token that simultaneously carries standard Solana staking rewards and entitles the holder to additional earnings from a blockspace marketplace where decentralized applications bid for prioritized, stake-weighted resource access. This design reduces effective network access costs for participating dApps while rewarding depositors with layered yield, which Solayer reported at approximately 12% native SOL yield as of early 2025.

By early 2025, the protocol had attracted over $133 million in SOL deposits from approximately 300,000 users. A later estimate placed total value locked above $500 million as the product expanded.

InfiniSVM: Hardware-Accelerated L1

Solayer's longer-term infrastructure project is InfiniSVM, a hardware-accelerated SVM-native blockchain that the team describes as the backbone for a vertically integrated financial stack. InfiniSVM applies techniques from high-frequency trading infrastructure to blockchain design, integrating RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), InfiniBand networking, FPGAs, and programmable switches to accelerate tasks such as signature verification and transaction sequencing.

The architecture uses a multi-executor cluster model with software-defined networking at its core, targeting 100 Gbps throughput, sub-second block confirmation, and one million transactions per second — orders of magnitude above standard Solana performance. InfiniSVM combines Proof-of-Authority and Proof-of-Stake consensus in its initial form. An alpha mainnet went live in January 2026.

Products and Services

Beyond the core restaking protocol and InfiniSVM chain, Solayer has expanded into consumer-facing financial products:

Margin Trade is a central limit order book-based perpetual DEX offering spot and perpetual trading across crypto, equities, and commodities, with unified portfolio management and fair auto-deleveraging.

Solayer Pay is a crypto-native Visa card enabling spending of stablecoins at conventional merchants globally. The product reported more than 45,000 cardholders across virtual and physical card tiers.

sUSD is a yield-bearing stablecoin backed by U.S. Treasury Bills, offering approximately 9.5% yield and available on Solana, Base, and the Solayer Chain. It is positioned as the native stablecoin for the Solayer financial stack.

Tokens

sSOL — Solayer's Liquid Restaking Token received upon depositing SOL or supported LSTs. It accrues both base staking rewards and additional restaking yield.

LAYER — The protocol's governance and utility token with a maximum supply of one billion. Token distribution allocates 51.23% to community and ecosystem, 17.11% to core contributors, 16.66% to investors, and 15% to the Foundation. LAYER is used for transaction fees on the Solayer Chain, protocol governance, and collateral within the ecosystem. Vesting schedules run up to four years for ecosystem development allocations.

sUSD — A yield-bearing stablecoin native to the Solayer stack, described above under products.

Team

Solayer Labs was co-founded by Rachel Chu and Jason Li. Chu leads product, marketing, and partnerships; she previously contributed to SushiSwap and holds a degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. Li serves as engineering director, with research background in distributed systems, cryptography, and security. Ryan Clark oversees market strategy and growth.

Funding

In May 2024, Solayer Labs closed a $12 million seed round at an $80 million valuation, structured as a SAFE with token warrants. The round was led by Polychain Capital and included Hack VC, Nomad Capital, Race Capital, ABCDE, Big Brain Holdings, Maelstrom (Arthur Hayes' family office), and Binance Labs.

In January 2026, coinciding with the alpha mainnet launch, Solayer and the Solayer Foundation announced a $35 million ecosystem fund targeting early- and growth-stage projects building on InfiniSVM and the broader Solayer stack.

Security and Audits

Solayer's smart contracts are open-source. Security audits are conducted by Ottersec on a routine basis. Major protocol actions are gated by decentralized multisig approval.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Solayer occupies a distinct position in the Solana ecosystem. On the restaking layer, it extends capital efficiency for SOL holders in a manner analogous to EigenLayer on Ethereum but natively integrated with Solana's stake-weighted quality-of-service system. On the infrastructure layer, InfiniSVM represents one of the more technically ambitious attempts to push SVM execution beyond standard validator hardware, targeting institutional and high-frequency use cases that require deterministic, ultra-low-latency settlement. The Mega Validator — Solayer's institutional-grade, hardware-optimized Solana validator — also participates in mainnet staking as a standalone offering for users seeking optimized staking returns without restaking complexity.