Why Hack VC Led SOON’s Seed Round
By Alex Botte (Partner), Alex Pack (Founding Partner), & Harrison Dahme (Research Partner)
For years crypto developers have faced a dilemma. If they wanted to optimize for user experience (fast finality, low fees), they shipped on Solana. If they wanted the deepest pools of assets and the broadest wallet distribution, they shipped on Ethereum. Bridging between those worlds meant forcing users through clunky hops, duplicated codebases, and fragmented liquidity. The result has been the slow bleed of adoption where every extra click in a bridge flow loses users, and every hour spent porting contracts is an hour not spent on shipping product.
That bottleneck is exactly where SOON (Solana Optimistic Network) focuses. The project begins from a simple premise: the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) is such a superior execution environment that it ought to run everywhere.
The SOON Vision in a Modular World
The modular infrastructure thesis states that by decomposing settlement, data availability, execution, and security, every layer can improve by an order of magnitude by affording focus without compromise, resulting in a more performant system overall. We have already seen improvements play out in the data availability (Celestia, EigenDA) and restaked security (EigenLayer) layers. SOON completes the vision for execution.
SOON’s architecture is remarkably elegant. A Decoupled‑SVM handles pure execution, and settlement anchors to whichever Layer 1 a builder prefers. State roots are merklized so base chains can verify them natively, while the use of the OP‑Stack provides familiar rollup guarantees and robust deployment patterns. Clever horizontal scaling techniques pushes transaction processing and signature verification out to Firedancer executors running on commodity hardware, already stress tested to 80,000 transactions per second. All of it is wrapped in a robust routing layer called InterSOON, built on Hyperlane (another Hack VC portfolio company), so assets and contract calls move across EVM domains, Solana, and TON as if they lived on a single chain and had a similar user experience.
The result is a menu: choose your settlement layer, choose your DA layer, and inherit Solana‑class performance.
Why Hack VC Invested Early
Hack VC and its partners have been underwriting the modular thesis since before Layer 2s were called Layer 2s. We’ve backed rollups, scaling solutions, shared sequencers, data availability layers, and restaking protocols across ecosystems. SOON is another investment within this thesis. SOON is a rollup, rollup infrastructure, and a messaging service all in one. The team ships fast, and there is a clear market need for its product.
Joanna Zeng, who ran partnerships at Coinbase, Optimism, and Aleo, and Andrew Zhou, a hands‑on blockchain engineer with half a decade in Rust and Golang, have led the team from whiteboard to mainnet in under twelve months. SOON already has multiple mainnets live today, including rollups on Ethereum and BNB Chain, as well as a strong pipeline of new rollups and L1s that want to launch SVM instances.
Traction and Near‑Term Catalysts
The early numbers read like a protocol years older than it is:
- 2M active users across all of SOON chains (SOON, svmBNB, and soonBase).
- Over 32M transactions processed across all chains.
- InterSOON has done more than $214M in volume with 57K transactions.
- More than 40 projects live on SOON mainnet.
- The SoonStack has powered 6 chains, with several more chains currently in development.
The End State We See
By giving builders Solana‑class performance on their blockchain of choice, SOON stands to become the default growth layer for the next hundred‑million on‑chain participants.
Hack VC is proud to help Joanna, Andrew, and the wider SOON community roll out SVM functionality everywhere. If you are a developer looking to launch an SVM chain, the open‑source repo is live. Message us – we would love to introduce you to the team.
Disclaimer
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