Building on Sealevel VM

Understanding the superiority of the Sealevel engine.

Sealevel refers to the engine which processes transactions on Solana. Sealevel allows for numerous parallel transactions to be processed on a chain, and this drives the chain's ability to process more transactions simultaneously. Parallel processing through a pipeline is a common design framework in CPUs, as it allows for multiple streams of data to be assigned to different parts of the processing hardware.

Sealevel allows the Solana Virtual Machine to run several contracts at the same time without letting the processing of any single contract affect broader block latency. This makes Solana's Sealevel VM a highly efficient layer for horizontal scaling. Another benefit to Sealevel is that it reduces the number of unconfirmed transactions in the pool. This helps to significantly reduce memory load on nodes, and makes block processing more efficient.

Nitro aims make the Sealevel Virtual Machine (SVM) a development standard, given the technical superiority it brings to transaction processing architecture. While Nitro is initially deploying SVM in the Cosmos ecosystem, in the long-term Nitro will enable SVM to become a standard across multiple ecosystems.

Solana's documentation go in more detail on how the Sealevel engine operates as the concurrent transaction processor in real-time.