How Does Termina Help to Scale Solana Apps Without Building Layer-2s?

Scaling Solana is a contentious topic. While some camps argue that all attention should be directed to boosting the Layer-1’s performance, others have opted for deploying appchains like Bullet and Sonic.

Nitro Labs sits somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Through its network extension platform, Termina, Nitro Labs helps teams scale their application without leaving Solana itself.

Speaking with SolanaFloor, Nitro Labs founder Yiwen Gao outlined some of Termina’s unique features and shared her two cents on how Solana might look in a post-Firedancer world.

Scaling Apps without leaving Solana

To give a simplistic, high-level overview, Termina is a suite of modules empowering app developers to scale their applications by moving processes off-chain. Unlike Solana Layer-2s, Termina’s modules don’t require developers to sacrifice the Layer-1s liquidity and network effect in exchange for an optimized environment.

“Our goal is to help apps scale on Solana without leaving the network and creating their own app chain or roll-up.”

One of Termina’s newest tools, Data Anchor, allows teams to store data in Solana’s ledger space while anchoring verifiable commitments on-chain, minimizing network bloat and reducing costs. According to Gao, this makes an app’s data management faster and more affordable, inherently boosting performance. Gao argues that Solana’s infrastructure, namely account rent, is poorly optimized for capital efficiency.

“[On] Solana, the account space is prime real estate, so that's what makes it so expensive. And especially for Solana, there is the concept of rent… You have to lock up funds. It's not capital efficient. And then even to just send the data in transactions on-chain, if you're hitting millions of requests per minute, it's not only uneconomical, it's also unfeasible from a technical perspective… Data Anchors help if you're hitting data limits on Solana L1.”

Beyond better data management, Termina’s SVM Engine offers faster and more predictable transaction processing. By batching, routing, and executing transactions off-chain, Termina’s stack claims to reduce latency and shield end users from harmful MEV, all while settling back to Solana asynchronously.
Separately, Termina’s zkSVM module provides a way to verify off-chain computation using zero-knowledge proofs. 

“For off-chain computation, we're happy to help with our zk-SVM to secure that computation as it works on-chain, and also this is open source, so anyone is free to use it as well. For data, if you're running into data limits, and then SVM, if you're running into execution delays."

Historically, Nitro Labs has made critical contributions to zk-proofing on Solana. According to Gao, Nitro Labs was the first team to create ZK proofing over arbitrary Solana transactions. This code was eventually open-sourced and implemented into the Agave codebase.

“For ZK and Solana, they actually were the first team to be able to generate ZK proofs over any Solana transaction… That was the work that we did, that we open-sourced, and actually contributed back to Agave. Our code is part of the main Agave codebase, and anyone can benefit from it.”

Building on Termina

Abstraction and simplicity have been a key focus for Nitro Labs throughout the development of the Termina stack. In the interest of making the developer experience as seamless as possible, Nitro Labs has packaged the Termina platform into a turnkey solution. 

Emerging projects looking to scale or secure their applications should be able to port over their existing codebase to their Termina platform extension. Gao asserts that providing a consistent and unified developer experience is key to helping teams deploy their apps efficiently.

“I want our team to take on all of the heavy lifting, so the user teams can just use the same tools, the same frameworks, the same stacks that they've been using… They don't need to do anything custom to work with our environment, but they'll just be able to get the scalability benefits very easily.”

This abstraction ultimately extends to the end user, who benefits from the familiarity and simplicity of the native Solana L1 experience.

“For the end users that are interacting with the platforms that these teams are building, they shouldn't know the difference at all… For the zkSVM, we're using Agave's SVM crate, so it should be exactly the same as Solana L1, and there shouldn't be any discrepancies.”

Solana After Firedancer

While the entirety of the Solana community is eagerly awaiting Jump Crypto’s upcoming client, Firedancer, Gao is curious to see how its implementation will impact the ecosystem. The Nitro Labs founder expressed concern that a complete exodus to Firedancer could negatively impact Solana’s client diversity.

“Because the purpose of Firedancer is to bring client diversity, so that if there's a bug in Agave, the whole network doesn't just crash and burn. If we just replace one client implementation with another, it cancels out the whole reason why we want to bring Firedancer in in the first place.”

Despite the excitement surrounding Firedancer, Gao expects that validators won’t be rushing to adopt the new client at launch. Highlighting Agave’s reputation and resiliency, Gao argues that larger validators might be cautious about making the switch without first monitoring its performance.

“I think adoption is going to take more time than we will expect. Agave is very well-trusted and has been battle-tested. I think especially for larger validators, like more institutional enterprise folks, they're going to be a bit more hesitant or a bit slower to switch to Firedancer… I don't know if there's a golden number [of clients], definitely more than one. And I don't think we need more than five or six.”

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