🧵 SOON vs Arbitrum vs OP Stack: Modular L2 Architectures Compared

Rollups are evolving.

While Arbitrum and OP Stack scale the EVM, SOON Network takes a radical approach — importing the Solana VM into Ethereum’s modular world.

Here’s a deep technical comparison of 3 L2 design philosophies 👇

2/ VM Execution Layer

🔹 Arbitrum:

Uses ArbOS on WASM, re-executes EVM bytecode

Custom WASM runtime, supports Nitro optimizations

Stays within EVM constraints

🔹 OP Stack:

Canonical EVM rollup

Minimal deviation from Ethereum semantics

Easier L1–L2 porting, but limited in performance

🔹 SOON:

Decoupled Solana VM (SVM)

Executes Rust smart contracts (via Sealevel)

Native parallelism, not bound to EVM gas model

✅ Verdict: SOON introduces runtime modularity, allowing cross-VM execution (EVM ↔ SVM)

3/ Parallelism

OP Stack & Arbitrum: sequential execution (same as Ethereum)

SOON: Sealevel parallelism → concurrent contract execution via static account analysis

This enables:

Better CPU utilization

More efficient tx throughput for compute-heavy dApps

Deterministic conflict detection

4/ Data Availability (DA)
Arbitrum: posts data to Ethereum; some chains use AnyTrust committee for partial DA
OP Stack: Ethereum blob (EIP-4844) by default; modular EigenDA support
SOON: full modular DA: Ethereum calldata/blobs, Celestia, EigenDA, Avail
SOON treats DA as swappable

5/ Interoperability & Messaging
Arbitrum: AnyTrust bridge + native tooling
OP Stack: Standard bridge infra, working on shared sequencer mesh
SOON: InterSOON built on Hyperlane → supports trustless messaging across EVM, SVM, Cosmos
SOON enables cross-VM message passing, not just token bridging.