Solana Optimistic Network (SOON) has raised an undisclosed amount in a co-builder funding round that attracted contributions from key industry figures, according to an Aug. 27 release shared with CryptoSlate.
Notable participants in the round include Solana executives Lily Liu and Anatoly ‘Toly’ Yakovenko, Coinbase Ventures director Jonathan King, and Celestia Labs co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam. Other contributors include AltLayer co-founder Amrit Kumar, Avail co-founder Prabal Banerjee, and Wormhole Foundation co-founder Robinson Burkey.
SOON
The funding will primarily be used to advance the development of SOON Stack, aimed at creating the most efficient and performant rollup for Layer 1 settlements, which uses the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) as the execution layer.
The funds will be used to fund SOON’s flagship products, including SOON Stack and SOON Mainnet. SOON Stack is a modular framework that combines SVM and OP Stack to enable the deployment of Layer 2 SVMs on Layer 1 platforms such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Cosmos.
SOON Mainnet is a general-purpose Layer 2 SVM solution that sits on top of the Ethereum blockchain, deployed using SOON Stack. Once launched, SOON aims to increase Ethereum’s transaction capacity by 650,000 transactions per second (TPS) using SVM.
Additionally, SOON plans to integrate a data availability layer, improving interoperability with CelestiaDA, EigenDA and Avail.
This funding is expected to position SOON as the highest throughput, low-fee staking stack, delivering scalability and efficiency for decentralized applications (dApps) on all Layer 1 blockchains.
Joanna Zeng, CEO of SOON, said the platform would combine Solana’s powerful SVM engine with Layer 1’s user bases. She added that this approach could establish SVM as the standard for every Layer 1 ecosystem, thereby attracting developers.
Zeng added:
“With SOON, we aim to be the most efficient rollup, reducing costs and increasing performance by 100x in each ecosystem, compared to the best performing EVM, while maintaining a culture that welcomes non-Solana blue chips.”
