Solana Virtual Machine (SVM)

Although the Solana community is still working through a formal specification of the SVM, the Anza team—formerly known as Solana Labs—has already modularized the SVM within the Agave validator client.

The SVM serves as an advanced execution engine for Solana programs, or smart contracts. It provides a high-performance environment that can process transaction batches in parallel and drastically reduce both latency and cost. This directly addresses the core issues of low throughput and high fees that are prevalent in older blockchain architectures like Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Anza’s SVM API is designed to be flexible and extensible to allow developers to tailor its functionality to their specific needs. This includes custom implementations for callbacks, banking operations, and state storage that are crucial for new and emerging use cases. For those looking to delve deeper, additional information can be found in Anza’s SVM explainer.