Somnia Unveils New Consensus Mechanism And Key Innovations For Achieving 400k TPS

For months, everyone has been asking the Somnia team the same question: “How can your blockchain possibly process over 400k transactions per second?”

Now, we’re finally ready to share some of the details about how it all works as we approach the launch of our devnet, and it’s all outlined in our updated litepaper.

The new litepaper details how Somnia has been optimized for bringing entire worlds’ data fully onchain, using a few key innovations that have been combined to create the fastest and most efficient EVM blockchain to ever exist.

Technical Innovations

This innovative design includes Somnia’s new Multistream Consensus, which enables sub-second block finality and higher transaction throughput. While sequential execution and compression algorithms efficiently handle high-density scenarios, moving 10-20x more data between nodes than other blockchains.

A new custom database, IceDB, enables read/write times of 15-100 nanoseconds, minimizing transaction costs to below a cent. This makes it the perfect platform for building large-scale, real-time applications in gaming, metaverses, NFTs, Finance and more, bringing millions of users, fully on-chain, and making the EVM far more efficient than ever before.

New Use Cases

This will enable games, social platforms and other mass-consumer applications to come fully on chain. It will also have important implications for finance and AI as well. Somnia’s high-performance blockchain can also improve trading by enabling the creation of on-chain Central Limit Order Books (CLOBs), which will give users the experience of a centralized exchange with the security guarantees of a decentralized blockchain, making it attractive for DeFi applications.

With the performance characteristics of the Somnia blockchain, more logic that currently exists off-chain can finally be moved on-chain. This could give rise to AI that operate on-chain. This AI could move between virtual worlds, interacting with users and other AI. This can get very interesting on-chain, because now AI can actually have their own wallets and become economically active.

Unlocking these new use cases will power the mass adoption of blockchain and Web3, and Somnia will be the best technology for these use cases, making it the obvious choice for developers and creators.

We are just scratching the surface here, but if you want to learn more, read the updated litepaper for yourself and be sure to let us know what you think through our community channels!