High-performance public chain "Newbie" Somnia, a technological dark horse backed by giants or a marketing bubble?

Author: Frank, PANews

The high-performance public chain track is becoming crowded.

On September 2nd, the L1 Somnia, claiming to have a million-level TPS, announced the launch of its mainnet and stated that it had completed 10 billion transactions on the testnet. Its native token SOMI also simultaneously listed on major exchanges such as Binance. Behind the project is the presence of the British unicorn company Improbable, as well as indirect support from top-tier capital such as SoftBank and a16z.

In stark contrast to its powerful technological narrative and capital halo, there were huge community controversies arising during the airdrop phase, as well as a rapid cooling of interest after its launch.

Is this ultimately an undervalued potential stock in the market, or a meticulously packaged marketing feast?

UK unicorn + top capital's choices after multiple transformations

Somnia is not a grassroots narrative crypto project; the development company behind it, Improbable, is quite reputable.

Improbable is a UK company founded in 2012 by several graduates from the University of Cambridge. The company's early business direction was towards a distributed cloud computing platform, and with its core product SpatialOS, Improbable secured a massive funding of $500 million led by SoftBank in 2017, making it the largest funding round for a UK startup in history at that time. In 2019, Improbable also signed a contract with the UK Ministry of Defence to apply its technology in military simulation, and it was even used in Ukraine's defense. Its founder Herman Narula was subsequently sanctioned by Russia.

In 2022, with the rise of the metaverse concept, the company shifted its focus to providing solutions for metaverse companies. However, the company has consistently failed to find a profitable path. It was not until 2023 that it transformed again, positioning itself as a "Venture Builder," focusing on incubating startups in the fields of artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the metaverse, and for the first time achieved annual profitability in the same year.

Somnia is an important project developed by Improbable responsible for core technology in this new "risk builder" model. The founder of Somnia, Paul Thomas, previously worked at Goldman Sachs. According to official information, Somnia will receive a commitment of $270 million in investment. However, this $270 million is not directly invested by institutions such as a16z, SoftBank, Mirana, SIG, etc., but is funded by Improbable, M², and the Virtual Society Foundation.

Is a million-level TPS strength or illusion?

Of course, Somnia's most striking label is undoubtedly its claimed "million-level TPS." Somnia's high performance primarily relies on two core technological innovations: the MultiStream Consensus ( and the Accelerated Sequential Execution ).

In simple terms, the innovation of the multi-stream consensus mechanism lies in the fact that traditional blockchains are like a single-lane highway, where all transactions must queue up for processing, which can easily cause congestion. Somnia, on the other hand, has transformed this road into a high-speed highway with countless lanes. Under this mechanism, each validator runs its own independent "data chain," allowing for parallel and asynchronous packaging of transaction blocks without waiting for global consensus. Meanwhile, an independent "consensus chain" patrols all data chains at a very high frequency (for example, every 20 milliseconds), synchronizing their states and making final confirmations. This design of "diversion and re-summation" solves the single point congestion problem and achieves extremely high throughput.

The difference between accelerated sequential execution and traditional public chains is that many high-performance public chains use a "parallel execution" scheme, which can lead to performance degradation due to state contention when processing a large number of related transactions (such as popular NFT minting). The key to Somnia is compiling EVM bytecode into highly optimized native machine code, allowing transaction execution speeds to approach that of native code written in high-performance languages like C++. This means that even when transactions are processed sequentially, they can be fast enough to handle high-concurrency scenarios, effectively avoiding the troubles of state contention.

From a technical perspective, Somnia's technical architecture has certain engineering innovations. However, the promotion of "one million TPS" clearly contains elements of "conceptual substitution." Somnia's officials acknowledge that the data of one million TPS was achieved under ideal conditions in the developer network by executing ERC-20 transfer operations with a very small computational load. This kind of testing does not represent the network load when running complex applications in the real world.

According to data from Chainspect, the peak TPS record for the Somnia testnet was around 25,000 within a window of 100 blocks. Although there is a significant gap compared to its claimed 1 million TPS, it can objectively be considered a high-performance public chain. Similarly, its testnet claims to have processed over 10 billion transactions, but a large portion of that was driven by a few applications. For instance, a single on-chain game called Chunked contributed 250 million transactions in just five days. Additionally, the official statement indicated that during the testnet phase, more than 118 million independent wallet addresses were created, along with over 70 ecosystem partners.

Observing its performance after the mainnet launch, on the day of launch, Somnia had approximately 68,000 active users, with around 256,000 transactions in 24 hours. Overall, its actual performance still needs to be observed.

( The airdrop has sparked ongoing disputes within the community.

Compared to its outstanding performance advantages and capital background, Somnia's reputation in the community is extremely passive. The comment section of the official announcement of the mainnet launch is filled with a large number of complaints about airdrop ineligibility or inability to claim.

According to community feedback, this mainly stems from the lack of transparency in Somnia's initial rules, unfair distribution, and the complex unlocking mechanism along with somewhat stingy allocations.

Many users have reported that early users who followed the official guidelines, completed a large number of Odyssey tasks, received test tokens, purchased official NFTs, and even paid nearly 5 dollars to complete KYC verification were ultimately told that they did not qualify for investment.

In addition, some users have pointed out that many genuine participants in the Chinese community have been disqualified, while the airdrop ratio in the English community seems to be higher, which has intensified the divisive sentiment within the community.

Even if the airdrop is received and a total share of 4.1% is allocated, with only 20% unlocked at the TGE, the requirement to complete tasks to unlock the remaining 80% still offends the users who received the airdrop.

In response to these controversies, Somnia founder Paul Thomas stated on social platform X that there are "account anomalies" in the query results and the team is addressing them.

The total supply of SOMI tokens is 1 billion, with an initial circulation of approximately 160 million tokens (accounting for 16.02% of the total). The core utilities of the token include paying Gas fees, staking on the network, and future on-chain governance. To maintain the value of the token, the protocol has designed a deflationary mechanism that destroys 50% of the Gas fees.

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However, Somnia's capabilities in terms of resources should not be underestimated. On the day the token launched, multiple exchanges including Binance, Bybit, Bitget, and MEXC announced the opening of SOMI trading.

After the token was launched, the SOMI price experienced a brief peak before quickly falling back, dropping from a high of $0.66 to a low of $0.42, and then stabilizing around $0.48, with a total market capitalization of about $480 million, ranking 437 on CMC.

In terms of the network ecosystem, at the time of the mainnet launch, Somnia stated that it had over 70 active development projects, primarily focused on the gaming sector, such as Sparkball, Variance, and Maelstrom. To attract more developers, the Somnia Foundation launched a $10 million grant program and several incubator projects.

Summary

Overall, Somnia is a project with very distinct pros and cons. The good aspect is that the performance advantages brought by Somnia's technical architecture have the potential to make it the next fastest public blockchain, and with backing from capital giants like a16z, SoftBank, and Temasek, it seems to have the potential to become a dark horse in the public blockchain space.

However, the downside lies in its airdrop phase operations, which have made it a subject of controversy in the most important community aspect. In addition, high performance in the current market environment is a double-edged sword; on one hand, it can quickly attract market attention. On the other hand, it faces the challenge of actual delivery and the inability to verify dissipating popularity. Moreover, the entire industry has begun to experience aesthetic fatigue regarding the "high-performance narrative." If no blockbuster is produced within the ecosystem, even the highest performance will only float in an empty castle.