Nethermind Supports Somnia Launch as a Validator

A step toward real-time, high-performance onchain applications

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Somnia’s Mainnet is now live, following a record-breaking testnet that processed more than 2 billion transactions and set a single-day EVM record of over 80 million. With this launch, Somnia aims to demonstrate high-throughput performance, targeting over 1 million transactions per second with sub-second finality and sub-cent fees.

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For Nethermind, supporting Somnia as a validator fits directly with our focus on securing and scaling blockchain infrastructure that enables new categories of applications.

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Why Somnia matters

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Somnia is designed for real-time, fully onchain experiences that go beyond traditional financial use cases. Its performance profile opens the door to large-scale games, immersive social platforms, and AI-powered applications. During the testnet phase, more than 60 validators worked together to maintain stability and decentralization even under high load, validating Somnia’s ability to operate at scale.

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These kinds of experiments are critical. As the industry moves toward mass-market adoption, blockchains must demonstrate that they can support millions of active users without compromising decentralization or reliability.

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Building blocks of Somnia’s approach

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Somnia introduces several novel design choices aimed at unlocking unprecedented throughput:

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• MultiStream Consensus, where each validator produces and publishes on its own independent data chain, finalized by a lightweight consensus layer.
• Accelerated Sequential Execution, which compiles EVM bytecode to optimized native code for efficient single-thread processing.
• IceDB, a custom blockchain database designed for deterministic performance under extreme workloads.
• Advanced compression and BLS signature aggregation, reducing communication overhead to sustain high throughput.

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These innovations illustrate a rethinking of how blockchains can be architected when the goal is real-time, consumer-grade applications.

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Nethermind’s role as a validator

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By participating in Somnia’s validator set, Nethermind contributes:

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• Network reliability: ensuring uptime and stable performance during high-volume periods.
• Operational expertise: applying our experience from Ethereum and other networks to strengthen validator performance and monitoring.
• Security and decentralization: supporting a diverse validator community to safeguard the network’s resilience.

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Our role is not just to run infrastructure, but to apply decades of combined engineering experience to help networks like Somnia validate their technical ambitions in practice.

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Looking ahead

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Somnia’s ecosystem is growing quickly, with partners across gaming, AI, DeFi, and social applications, alongside integrations with familiar developer tools and enterprise providers. As a validator, Nethermind will continue to support the expansion of this ecosystem while helping ensure Somnia’s infrastructure remains reliable and decentralized, as it has for almost two years now, starting as an R&D partner.

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For us, the Mainnet launch is only the beginning. We are excited to see how developers push the limits of what can be built on Somnia and how our validator role can help bring these applications safely to production.