Somnia L1 Mainnet Goes Live
A new EVM-compatible Layer 1, Somnia Network, has launched its mainnet. The project is making bold claims of achieving over 1 million transactions per second, positioning itself as a high-performance alternative in the crowded L1 space.
The Somnia mainnet officially went live on September 2, 2025, developed by the metaverse technology company Improbable in partnership with the Somnia Foundation. The project is led by founder Paul Thomas and backed by Improbable's CEO Herman Narula, with a focus on powering real-time, commercial-scale applications like gaming and social platforms. Before its mainnet launch, Somnia's testnet processed over 10 billion transactions from more than 118 million wallet addresses. At one point, it handled a record-breaking 1.9 billion transactions in a single day, the highest ever reported for an EVM-compatible blockchain. The network's high throughput is achieved through a novel "MultiStream Consensus" mechanism and a custom-built database called IceDB, which helps lower transaction costs to a fraction of a cent. This architecture is designed to prevent the network congestion issues seen on other high-profile blockchains. Somnia is backed by $270 million in committed investment from Improbable, MSquared, and the Somnia Foundation. The project also has significant support from major venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and Digital Currency Group. A native token, $SOMI, has been introduced to facilitate transaction fees, validator rewards, and ecosystem incentives. The tokenomics include a deflationary mechanism where 50% of gas fees are permanently burned. The total supply is capped at 1 billion tokens. To foster its ecosystem, Somnia has launched a $10 million grant program and the "Dream Catalyst" accelerator to onboard developers. At launch, the network already supported over 70 active projects, including on-chain games like Sparkball and Variance, with infrastructure partners like Google Cloud and LayerZero.
