7.2 Solution: From Application to Infrastructure - introducing ValueChain
Overview
ValueChain is the infrastructure behind SoDex, a foundation for a broader financial transformation. Designed from the ground up for performance, scalability, and modular execution, it delivers:
High-performance architecture - including global trading platforms with complex matching requirements and transaction systems with massive concurrent volumes
Containerized Blockchain Architecture - In ValueChain’s design, the HostChain, produced by the consensus algorithm, serves as the foundational host layer. The HostChain accommodates multiple guest chains, including an EVM-compatible system chain (syschain) and several application chains (appchains).
EVM syschain as unified account system: The EVM system manages the overall system state of ValueChain and provides full support for all EVM-compatible dApps. Beyond that, it also acts as the unified account system for other appchains, ensuring that every appchain remains interoperable with the broader EVM ecosystem. Each appchain, in turn, maintains the transactions and state of its dedicated application, enabling deterministic and high-performance execution.
Interoperable guest-chains - while each guest-chain in ValueChain is logically independent, their data are all stored physically colocated within blocks of the HostChain. This design allows us to implement fast, reliable message passing channels within HostChain to achieve instant interoperability between guest-chains.
ValueChain currently consists of:
A spot order-book appchain powering SoDEX Spot
A perpetual order-book appchain powering SoDEX Perpetuals
An EVM System Chain, serving as the unified account for all app chains
Future customized appchains — including but not limited to RWA, stablecoins, lending protocols, and other emerging financial applications
SoDex is ValueChain’s first application and its initial two appchains - powering the spot and perpetual trading respectively. SoDex gives us a glimpse of what ValueChain could do and the limitless possibilities.
In past generations of public blockchain design, the pursuit of performance - without compromising decentralization - has been the community’s holy grail. For applications like onchain orderbook trading or high-frequency financial systems, developers sought ways to overcome the inherent limitations of legacy architectures. Many projects chose to push the boundaries of existing virtual machine layers (EVM/VM), iterating on performance to reconcile decentralization with scalability.
But after years of iteration, it became increasingly clear that an EVM-centered architecture - originally designed by Ethereum with decentralization and security as its primary goals - was fundamentally not optimized for high-throughput financial computation. As even Vitalik Buterin reaffirmed in recent speeches, the EVM prioritizes reliability and censorship resistance above execution speed. Solutions like EVM parallelism have run into theoretical and implementation bottlenecks, making practical deployment extremely difficult.
Recognizing this, the new wave of infrastructure project ValueChain has taken a different path: application-driven chain design. Instead of adapting existing infrastructure to fit emerging use cases, they start from the application layer - identifying the needs of real users and working backwards toward infrastructure innovation.
In traditional web2 applications, execution determinism is rarely a concern; the backend simply executes and serves results. But in decentralized systems, every node must deterministically arrive at the same result independently. This introduces a new requirement: deterministic execution logic at the application level, not just at the protocol level.
To address this, we introduce the concept of D²APPs - Deterministic Decentralized Applications. These are decentralized applications specifically designed to produce verifiable and deterministic outcomes, enabling consistent validation across all nodes.
Modular Framework: How ValueChain Generalizes the D²APP Model
ValueChain provides the first generalized public infrastructure optimized for D²APPs, akin to how NVIDIA CUDA standardized GPU parallel computing.
ValueChain offers both a performant consensus layer and a modular execution framework that makes it easy for developers to build, test, and deploy D²APPs across a range of financial verticals. With its MegaBlock architecture, ValueChain treats each guest chain as a specialized zone, tightly coupled but independently scalable, making the ValueChain inherently composable and parallelizable.
Just as CUDA unlocked new computing paradigms by making GPU power accessible to developers, ValueChain is unlocking new on-chain financial applications by providing:
A deterministic execution environment tailored for high-frequency, high-integrity applications
A framework and SDK to help developers transform traditional apps into verifiable D²APPs
Flexible subchain structures, enabling developers to isolate, scale, and optimize their own logic without compromising the shared state integrity of the broader network
The SoDex testnet launch - with separate D²APPs subchains for spot and perpetual trading - serves as a working demonstration of this architecture in action. It shows how the chain’s modularity and determinism enable real-world applications to run at scale while preserving decentralization.
In doing so, ValueChain not only meets the demands of today's financial innovators - it provides a blueprint for the next generation of decentralized high performance finance applications to thrive.
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