Why Hack VC Co-Led Solayer's Seed Round
By Alex Botte, Partner at Hack VC
At Hack VC, we focus on investments that drive innovation and scalability in the blockchain sector. Over the past few years we have made several investments in the shared security / restaking category. These projects allow users to stake the same tokens they’ve staked on blockchains to secure other networks simultaneously. We started with Eigenlayer (a restaking solution for ETH), applied the same thesis to BTC through our investment in Babylon, and sought to do the same with SOL.
We originally were excited about Solayer as a shared security / restaking network that used SOL to secure other Solana-integrated systems. We thought it was an intuitively tremendous opportunity given how large the market size is for SOL. And the reaction was palpable – Solayer grew to ~$300M in TVL (SOL staked).[1]
However, the vision for Solayer has expanded and is much broader than solely (pun intended) SOL restaking. Solayer has entered the race to become the most performant blockchain in all of Web3.
The Problem
Current blockchain networks struggle with scalability, leading to high transaction costs, slow processing, and limited throughput. These challenges hinder broader adoption and the practical scalability of blockchain applications. With the expansion of blockchain use cases like payments, AI agents, decentralized physical infrastructure networks, and trading, network congestion issues and high transaction fees will become more and more prominent, impacting user experience and developer adoption. Therefore, we need more highly performant blockspace. Enter: Solayer.
Solayer’s Solution
Solayer is a comprehensive, hardware-accelerated blockchain that is built to scale Solana. It is designed to handle billions of users and potentially the trillions of AI agents that will serve them.[2] Its advantages include:
- Seamless Developer Integration: Solayer is SVM compatible, meaning it’s able to tap into the Solana ecosystem today, and developers can easily deploy or integrate their Solana applications on Solayer’s chain.
- Easy Onboarding: Solayer has a seamless user experience in which onboarding onto the Solayer chain is abstracted away with no manual bridging.
- Advanced Hardware-Accelerated Architecture: Solayer’s approach includes distributing workloads across microservices and specialized hardware acceleration technologies like RDMA, InfiniBand, and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), significantly improving transaction processing efficiency and reducing latency. We think Solayer will achieve a substantial increase over Solana's current TPS capabilities and pave the way for more extensive and complex applications to operate efficiently.
- Improved Asset Productivity: Solayer's restaked SOL utilizes Solayer’s AVSs (Actively Validated Services), not only boosting security but also increasing the yield on staked assets, thereby making them more productive and beneficial for the ecosystem.
- Unified Liquidity: Solayer implements cross-chain contract calls and a native bridge to ensure efficient communication between Solana and the Solayer chain, which is important for maintaining liquidity.
Solayer leverages advanced technological frameworks and has a clear, strategic vision for blockchain scalability. We are proud to co-lead its seed round and support Solayer as it executes on its vision to transform blockchain infrastructure to become the most scalable blockchain in all of Web3.
Footnotes
[1] Source: Solayer.
[2] Source: Solayer.
Disclosures
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