SVM-powered Solayer launches $35 million ecosystem fund on the heels of alpha mainnet launch

Solayer, the alternative Layer 1 powered by the Solana Virtual Machine, is launching a $35 million ecosystem fund to support onchain app development.

"The program targets high-throughput, real-time onchain applications with clear revenue models, strong fundamentals, and deep technical foundations," the team announced on Tuesday.

Solayer is powered by a bespoke "infiniSVM" engine, which has reportedly demonstrated 330,000+ transactions per second and approximately 400 milliseconds of finality. Solana, by comparison, offers a theoretical max of 65,000 tx/s and 4 ms blocktime, according to Chainspect data.

Many crypto ecosystems launch multi-million dollar funding initiatives and host hackathons to spur native app development. This latest initiative builds on Soylayer's previous Solayer Accel incubation program, which onboarded early-stage founders behind buff.trade, an AI-powered trading platform, DoxX, a hardware-accelerated MetaDEX, and Spout Finance, a platform tokenizing traditional financial assets.

Initially focused on a Solana-based restaking protocol, the Solayer team began development of InfiniSVM as early as January 2025. The idea was to build a hardware-accelerated SVM blockchain to horizontally scale Solana’s network infrastructure and meet the bandwidth requirements of specialized decentralized applications, like non-custodial crypto cards.

The Solayer mainnet launched in alpha in December, according to a press release.

Although Solayer operates independently of the main Solana network, users can bridge assets between the two using the sBridge and use SOL for gas fees and staking, meaning Solayer functions like "a specialized performance layer rather than a competing ecosystem," the team notes.

R&D firm Solayer Labs raised a $12 million seed round led by Polychain Capital in 2024. And last year, the project introduced its LAYER governance token to "accelerate ecosystem growth and protocol development."