Somnia, a high-performance public blockchain "newcomer", is it a technological dark horse backed by giants or a marketing bubble?

Somnia, a new Layer 1 blockchain developed by British unicorn Improbable and backed by investors like SoftBank and a16z, has launched its mainnet with claims of achieving millions of transactions per second (TPS). However, its performance and legitimacy are under scrutiny.

Background: Somnia is developed by Improbable, a UK-based tech company with significant backing from top investors. The project has received $270 million in committed investment.
Technology: It uses two core innovations—MultiStream Consensus and Accelerated Sequential Execution—to enable high throughput. While its testnet processed 10 billion transactions, real-world TPS peaked at around 25,000, far below the claimed "million-level."
Controversy: The project faced significant community backlash due to an opaque and unfair airdrop distribution, complex unlocking mechanisms, and allegations of regional bias.
Tokenomics: The native token SOMI has a total supply of 1 billion, with an initial circulation of 160 million. It is used for gas fees, staking, and governance, with a deflationary mechanism that burns 50% of gas fees.
Market Performance: After listing on major exchanges like Binance, SOMI's price saw initial volatility before stabilizing, with a market cap of around $480 million at launch.
Ecosystem: Somnia has over 70 development projects, primarily in gaming, and has launched a $10 million grant program to attract developers.

While Somnia shows promise due to its technical innovation and strong backing, it faces challenges in community trust, delivering on its high-performance claims, and building a sustainable ecosystem.

By Frank, PANews

The high-performance public chain track is becoming crowded.

On September 2nd, L1 Somnia, boasting a million-level transaction per second (TPS), announced the launch of its mainnet and reported completing 10 billion transactions on its testnet. Its native token, SOMI, was also listed on major exchanges such as Binance. Behind the project are the British unicorn Improbable and indirect backing from top investors such as SoftBank and a16z.

In sharp contrast to its powerful technical narrative and capital halo is the huge community controversy it caused during the airdrop phase and the rapid cooling of its popularity after its launch.

Is this a potential stock that is temporarily underestimated by the market, or a carefully packaged marketing feast?

The choice of British unicorns and top capital after several transformations

Somnia is not a grassroots crypto project; the development company behind it, Improbable, has a great background.

Improbable is a British company founded in 2012 by several Cambridge University graduates. Its early focus was on a distributed cloud computing platform. Leveraging its core product, SpatialOS, Improbable secured a massive $500 million funding round in 2017, led by SoftBank, the largest ever for a British startup at the time. In 2019, Improbable also signed a contract with the UK Ministry of Defence to apply its technology to military simulations and even to Ukrainian defense efforts. This led to Russian sanctions against its founder, Herman Narula.

In 2022, with the rise of the metaverse concept, the company shifted its focus to providing solutions for metaverse companies. However, the company never found a path to profitability. It wasn't until 2023 that it pivoted again, positioning itself as a "venture builder," focusing on incubating startups in the fields of artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the metaverse. That same year, it achieved its first annual profit.

Somnia is leveraging this new "venture builder" model, with Improbable leading key projects in core technology development. Somnia's founder, Paul Thomas, previously worked at Goldman Sachs. Official information indicates that Somnia will receive $270 million in committed investment. However, this $270 million is not directly invested by institutions like a16z, SoftBank, Mirana, and SIG, but rather comes from Improbable, M², and the Virtual Society Foundation.

Is a million-level TPS a reality or an illusion?

Of course, Somnia's most eye-catching feature is undoubtedly its claimed "millions of transactions per second." Somnia's high performance relies primarily on two core technological innovations: MultiStream Consensus and Accelerated Sequential Execution.

Simply put, the innovation of the multi-stream consensus mechanism lies in the fact that a traditional blockchain is like a single-lane highway, where all transactions must queue for processing, easily leading to congestion. Somnia transforms this highway into a multi-lane highway. Under this mechanism, each validator runs its own independent "data chain," which can package transaction blocks in parallel and asynchronously, without waiting for full network consensus. Simultaneously, an independent "consensus chain" patrols all data chains at a very high frequency (for example, every 20 milliseconds) to synchronize and finalize their states. This "divide and re-aggregate" design eliminates single-point congestion and achieves extremely high throughput.

Accelerating sequential execution differs from traditional public chains in that the "parallel execution" approach employed by many high-performance public chains can lead to performance degradation due to state contention when processing large numbers of connected transactions (such as the minting of popular NFTs). The key to Somnia lies in compiling EVM bytecode into highly optimized native machine code, enabling transaction execution speeds approaching those of native code written in high-performance languages like C++. This ensures that even when transactions are processed sequentially, the speed is sufficient to handle high-concurrency scenarios, effectively avoiding the problems of state contention.

From a technical perspective, Somnia's technical architecture demonstrates significant engineering innovation. However, the promotion of "millions of TPS" is a clear misrepresentation. Somnia officials acknowledged that the 1 million TPS figure was achieved under ideal conditions within the developer network, using ERC-20 transfers with minimal computational effort. This test does not represent the network load experienced when running complex applications in the real world.

Chainspect data shows that the Somnia testnet recorded a peak transaction per second (TPS) of approximately 25,000 within a 100-block window. While this is significantly below the claimed 1 million TPS, it objectively qualifies as a high-performance public chain. Similarly, the testnet claims to have processed over 10 billion transactions, but a significant portion of this was driven by a small number of applications. For example, a single on-chain game called Chunked accounted for 250 million transactions in just five days. Furthermore, officials stated that during the testnet phase, over 118 million unique wallet addresses and over 70 ecosystem partners were added.

Observing Somnia's performance after its mainnet launch, the network had approximately 68,000 active users on launch day and approximately 256,000 transactions over a 24-hour period. Overall, its actual performance remains to be seen.

Airdrops sparked controversy in the community

Despite its outstanding performance and capital background, Somnia's reputation in the community is quite negative. The comments section of the official mainnet launch announcement was filled with complaints about being ineligible or unable to claim the airdrop.

According to community feedback, this is mainly due to the opaque early rules of Somnia, unfair distribution, complex unlocking mechanism and slightly stingy shares.

Many users reported that after following official guidelines, they completed a large number of Odyssey tasks, received test tokens, purchased official NFTs, and even paid nearly $5 to complete KYC verification as early users, but were eventually told that they were not eligible for airdrops.

In addition, some users pointed out that many real participants in the Chinese community were disqualified, while the airdrop ratio in the English community seemed to be higher, which exacerbated the confrontational sentiment in the community.

Even if you receive the airdrop and are allocated 4.1% of the total share, and only 20% can be unlocked during TGE, you still need to complete tasks to unlock the remaining 80%, which offends the users who receive the airdrop.

In response to these controversies, Somnia founder Paul Thomas said on the social platform X that there were "account anomalies" in the query results and the team was handling it.

The total supply of SOMI tokens is 1 billion, with an initial circulation of approximately 160 million (16.02% of the total supply). The token's core utilities include gas fee payments, network staking, and future on-chain governance. To maintain the token's value, the protocol incorporates a deflationary mechanism that burns 50% of gas fees.

However, Somnia's resource capabilities cannot be underestimated. On the day the token was launched, several exchanges including Binance, Bybit, Bitget, and MEXC announced the opening of SOMI trading.

After the token was launched, the price of SOMI experienced a brief peak and then quickly fell back, from a high of $0.66 to a maximum of $0.42, and then stabilized at around $0.48. The total market value was approximately $480 million, ranking 437 on CMC.

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

Summarize

Overall, Somnia is a project with distinct strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, the performance advantages offered by Somnia's technical architecture could potentially make it the next fastest public blockchain. Backed by capital giants like a16z, SoftBank, and Temasek, Somnia appears to have the potential to become a dark horse public blockchain.

However, its airdrop operations have led to controversy in the crucial community. Furthermore, high performance is a double-edged sword in the current market environment. On the one hand, it can quickly attract market attention. On the other hand, it faces the challenge of verifying actual delivery and fading popularity. Furthermore, the industry is beginning to experience fatigue with the "high-performance narrative." If the ecosystem fails to create a hit product, even the highest performance will remain a castle in the air.