Solana Optimistic Network (SOON) has raised an undisclosed amount in a co-builder funding round that drew contributions from key industry figures, according to an August 27 statement shared with Crypto.
Notable participants in the round include Solana leaders Lily Liu and Anatoly “Toly” Yakovenko, Coinbase Ventures director Jonathan King, and Celestia Labs co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam. Other contributors include Amrit Kumar, co-founder of AltLayer, Prabal Banerjee, co-founder of Avail, and Robinson Burkey, co-founder of Wormhole Foundation.
SOON
The funding will primarily advance the development of SOON Stack, with the goal of creating the most efficient and powerful rollup for Layer 1 settlements, using the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) as the execution layer.
The funds will support 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 implementation of SVM Layer 2 on Layer 1s such as Ethereum, Bitcoin and Cosmos.
SOON Mainnet is a general-purpose SVM Layer 2 solution that settles on the Ethereum blockchain, implemented using SOON Stack. Once launched, SOON aims to increase Ethereum’s transaction capacity by 650,000 transactions per second (TPS) using the SVM.
Additionally, SOON plans to integrate a data availability layer, improving interoperability with CelestiaDA, EigenDA, and Avail.
This funding is expected to SOON position it as the highest throughput, low cost rollup stack, providing scalability and efficiency for decentralized applications (dApps) across all Layer 1 blockchains.
SOON’s CEO Joanna Zeng stated that the platform will combine Solana’s powerful SVM engine with Layer 1 userbases. She added that this approach could make SVM the standard for any Layer 1 ecosystem, which would attract developers.
Zeng added:
“With SOON, we aim to be the most efficient rollup, reducing costs and improving performance by a hundredfold in any ecosystem, compared to the best performing EVM, while maintaining a culture that welcomes non-Solana blue chips.”