Fantom was the darling blockchain network of crypto-town last bull cycle. It had the blessings of Andre Cronje and was deemed to be an Ethereum killer.

In fact, Fantom was a part of the equation with other low-cost, high-speed networks like Avalanche and Solana.

However, as the space evolves, it’s clear that staying ahead requires more than just hype. Projects need to innovate relentlessly and offer real value to stand out in a field that’s becoming increasingly crowded.

The dev landscape is getting more competitive with every passing day. It’s like a race where the finish line keeps moving.

If a project wants to stay in the game and continue thriving, customizable tweaks aren’t just nice-to-haves, they’re the secret sauce. Without them, a project might as well be a floppy disk in a cloud storage world.

Instead of folding their hands and sitting, the Fantom team rolled up their sleeves and started building their new tech stack.

So, if you’ve stuck around, you’re in for a treat.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may know that Fantom has revamped itself to Sonic and is rolling out a brand new speed-focused Ethereum Virtual Machine [EVM] compatible layer-1 [L1] blockchain.

The Sonic chain will connect to Ethereum via a tailor-made decentralized gateway, allowing Sonic to tap into liquidity options, users, and protocols.

Put simply, Sonic is basically the protégé of the Fantom Opera Network.

Andre Cronje, the main character of this Fantom-Sonic tale, was Fantom’s Chair and Technical Advisor between 2018 and 2022. He then went MIA for a bit but later stepped back into the fray as Sonic’s Chief Technology Officer.

Now with a fresh face and complete rebrand, Sonic is looking to become the go-to chain for developers. Up to 90% of the network’s generated transaction fees will be paid back to them.  

It’s simple: with the amped-up rewards, devs get a sustainable revenue stream, and ultimately, innovation and long-term commitment will be brewed as the by-products.

Sonic: Overview

From a tech perspective, Sonic aims to give users a seamless experience thanks to its refined scalability and storage capabilities.

The new network is expected to process up to 10,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality. This marks a hugeeee jump when compared to Fantom Opera’s single-digit real-time average.  

You may now wonder how the team is going to pull off such a huge jump in speed. Well, Sonic’s Virtual Machine [VM] will replace the old Ethereum Virtual Machine model.

The new VM will convert the old EVM bytecode into a new virtual machine format. It will also underpin super instructions and optimize bundles of commonly occurring transaction types.

This is a fancy way of saying that it will allow validators to execute smart contracts with higher efficiency and bring a multifold speed enhancement when compared to the old EVM mechanics.

The new chain will maintain EVM compatibility. This compatibility is crucial for retaining the existing developer base and making sure the migration of dApps is smooth.

No drama, just plug-and-play with way more speed! The dream, innit?

Incentive programs

Everyone who uses the Sonic chain is set to be incentivized in one way or another. I mean, who doesn’t like rewards?

Fee Monetization

Sonic’s Fee Monetization [FeeM] program [called Gas Monetization previously] ain’t just a rebrand; it’s a jackpot for developers.

The lack of earning opportunities for devs often stifles innovation. Without consistent revenue streams, many are forced to rely on short-term grants, token sales, and sometimes even personal funding to keep their projects alive.

It ain’t just creativity that suffers — talented devs are often driven away in search of more stable options.

Imagine earning up to 90% of the fees your app generates. That’s not just covering your coffee budget; it’s sustainable income, a magnet for top-tier creators, and a big boost for network infra.

Sonic is making this a reality.

Apps, however, have to be approved to participate in FeeM to start earning a share of the fees their apps generate.

Innovator Fund

The team has earmarked up to 200 million S tokens to encourage the onboarding of new apps on Sonic. This fund will also be used to support new ventures.

Airdrops

For the average user like you, me, Tom, Dick, and Harry, the airdrop has us covered. The team is looking to distribute 190.5 million S tokens [6% of the total supply] to incentivize users of both Fantom and the new Sonic chain.  

We’ll deep-dive into this bit in an upcoming section.

Consensus

Sonic uses a PoS, DAG-based, ABFT consensus mechanism. Too many acronyms, yeah?!

To boil it all down, it’s a proof-of-stake model. The emphasis lies on energy efficiency and security. Nodes on the Sonic network oughta lock up at least 50,000 S tokens. This will push them to act in a non-deceptive way because their stake is at risk if they try to pull off clownery.

This PoS approach is designed to thwart Sybil attacks by making it costly and risky for attackers to set up malicious validators. Sonic's use of staking kinda makes sure that only committed participants can validate transactions and secure the network effectively.

Since we're talking about the token, at the time of the new Sonic network launch, the FTM token will become the S token. It’ll be upgradable on a 1:1 basis.

Before I get into the details of the how part, let me first walk you through the tokenomics.

The S token

S, the native token of the network, will mainly be used to:

• Pay for transaction fees
• Run validators
• Stake
• Take part in governance

You can purchase the token directly from decentralized exchanges on Sonic. After launch, it’ll gradually go live on key centralized exchanges as well.

Sonic will kick off with 3.175 billion S tokens, mirroring FTM's total supply. Similarly, S tokens in circulation will be equivalent to the circulating FTM supply.

Six months after launch, Sonic will start linearly minting more tokens. That’ll be diverted towards scaling operations, marketing, partnerships, growth programs, and Sonic University.

Community members have agreed to mint 1.5% of S (i.e. 47,625,000 tokens) per year for six years.

Inflation obviously remains a concern, and to guard against it, Sonic will burn the newly minted tokens not used during the year.

This will ensure that 100% of all the newly minted tokens from this initiative are diverted towards the growth of the network. No remains will be sent to the treasury for future use.

There are other burning mechanisms in place to help reduce the emission of the new tokens.

Remember I told you that apps have to be approved to participate in FeeM to start earning a share of the fees their apps generate? Now, say you submit a transaction on an app that isn't participating in FeeM, then half the transaction fee will be burnt.

There’s provision for an airdrop burn too, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

To wrap up other technical nitty-gritty — block rewards are all set to migrate from Fantom Opera to Sonic. Opera's block rewards will be reduced to zero as and when validators and stakers move to Sonic. The saved funds, in turn, will be used to reward Sonic validators.  

The staking mechanism for the S token is pretty ideal — there’s a 14-day withdrawal period for staked S. They’re sort of sticking to the standard.

The upgrade

Now comes the most important part — the upgrade. To utilize your S token within the ecosystem, you first need to have S tokens in your hands.

The Sonic Labs token upgrade contract will foster the FTM to S upgrade. You’ll be able to convert FTM to S at a 1:1 ratio.

If you hold your FTM on a CEX, then you pretty much have to do nothing. Sonic Labs is working with CEXes to offer a way to automatically swap your tokens from FTM to S directly on exchanges.

However, if you want to be involved in the upgrade process, you’ll have to withdraw your tokens into an on-chain wallet and use the official upgrade bridge on MySonic.

Here’s how you can do it:

• First, go to my.soniclabs.com/upgrade
• Connect your web3 wallet
• Type in the amount of FTM you wanna upgrade
• Check if you’re receiving the same amount of S on Sonic
• Pay the fee
• Approve the transaction

Voila, you’ll receive your S on the same address on Sonic in less than a minute. It’s that easy.

For the first 90 days, you'll be able to swap between the two tokens as you please. But when this period ends, swaps will only be possible in one direction — from FTM to S.

At launch, you will also be able to unlock your staked FTM and bridge your assets immediately to Sonic.

Meanwhile, if you have LP positions, you’ll have to break all your existing LP positions on Fantom, migrate each token individually, and then recreate the positions on Sonic.

That being said, your transaction history will not migrate. It’ll remain on the original chain. Sonic will launch as a brand-new chain with no history.

Why you should bridge to Sonic

Now comes the airdrop incentives part that I promised to touch upon later.

Sonic Points

If you’re a user, your allocation will be decided based on your app and token interactions, loyalty, adoption, and participation.

Sonic Points are divided into two categories — passive liquidity points and activity points.  

The former rewards users for bridging primary assets onto the Sonic mainnet. Meanwhile, the latter offers a multiplier on top of passive liquidity points, which implies you have to actively engage with the ecosystem and deploy your assets.

The points will be distributed across multiple seasons, with the first one ending in mid-2025. To earn points, you have to bridge or use whitelisted assets within the Sonic ecosystem via any approved app.

S and S LSTs will fetch you a 3x multiplier, while scUSD, scETH, and ONE will bestow you with 2x. Stables like USDC and USDT, alongside SolvBTC and SolvBTC.BBN will give you a 1x.

Sonic Gems

If you’re a developer, then your allocation will be decided considering your app innovation, and user engagement stats.  

Gems will be distributed across multiple seasons and can be redeemed for S tokens.  

Sonic Gems are off-chain airdrop points that are designed for apps.

The PvP setup and capped gem supply mean your app’s gem balance will play musical chairs daily — how much you have will depend on how the other apps are faring.

Points are airdrop points designed for users. However, that is not the case for Gems. Gems empower apps to claim liquid S tokens instead of vested NFT airdrop positions.

Once the S tokens are claimed, the app team decides how to distribute them to users.

There’s no hard rule saying apps have to share a slice of their S pie with users, but let’s be real: Gems are designed to make generosity look good. Apps that share more S with their communities end up scoring bigger rewards.

The moral of the story? Sharing is caring — and rewarding.

A total of 1.680 million Gems will be distributed during season 1. Apps are assigned different weights depending on their level of exclusivity to Sonic.

2x if they’re Sonic-native, 1x if they’re primarily on Sonic but are accessible elsewhere, and 0.5x if they’re available across multiple chains.

The linear decay mechanism

The Sonic team has added a twist to the classic airdrop formula, applying game theory to smooth out the bumps in rewarding early adopters.

The added challenge for you and me? To play against both time and strategy.

The airdrop ain’t just about handing out tokens; it’s about making you think before you make your next move. With the linear decay mechanism in play, you need to remember one thing: the more you rush, the more you might have to sacrifice.

Let’s break it down.

On the first day of the airdrop, 1/4th of your token allocation will become available immediately. You can claim that right away.

The rest? Well, that’s locked up for the next 270 days in the form of NFT positions. If you’re in a hurry, you can go ahead and claim more early, but be warned: you’ll have to burn a portion of your tokens to do that.

Wanna get your hands on the full stash before it’s matured? There’s an NFT marketplace where you can trade your airdrop allocation.

If you’re still confused, I’ll let the numbers do some talking.

Suppose you’re eligible to get 10,000 tokens. Day one: you grab 2,500 tokens (that’s 25%). After 90 days, if you decide you’re done waiting, you can claim 1/3 of the remaining tokens, but burn 2/3 of ‘em. So, 2,500 for you, but goodbye to the other 5,000.

But if you’re impatient, and after 30 days, you want the rest of your airdrop? You’ll get roughly 11% of the remaining 75% while burning about 89%. Talk about making quick moves — just know it comes with a price.

Owing to the legal landscape, users from a handful of locations — including the United States — do not qualify for the airdrop. Alongside a self-declaration from your end, the team will tighten the vaults with the help of geoblocking and other measures.  

The crux of why Sonic is important

The subhead for this section says why should you bridge to Sonic. Now that we’re done with all the theoretical stuff, let’s get to the actual reasons.

Sonic, as a matter of fact, is bringing DeFi back to its roots.

You, as a user, can make the most of your capital. RWAs and BTC, for example, are going to go live on Sonic post-launch.

Exhibit 1: Sonic has tied up with Backed, Chainlink, and Fortlake Asset Management to tokenize the latter’s Sigma Opportunities Fund to help bring TradFi assets on-chain on Sonic.

Backed is flipping the script of traditional funds by tokenizing them, creating permissionless tokens that are fully collateralized at a 1:1 ratio.

These tokens are pegged to the real-time prices of the assets, making them prime for the DeFi scene and ready to roll within the Sonic ecosystem.

Exhibit 2: To add another feather to Sonic’s hat, the team has tied up with Solv Protocol to allow users to mint SolvBTC and SolvBTC.BBN natively on Sonic.

By using SolvBTC and SolvBTC.BBN across DeFi applications on Sonic, you’ll also qualify for a share of the ~200 million S airdrop.

You can mint SolvBTC.BBN, a liquid yield token that represents staked Bitcoin within the Babylon ecosystem.

SolvBTC.BBN can be used across various DeFi apps on Sonic, allowing you to earn even more rewards, trade, or leverage their assets without any compromise. It’s like having your cake and eating it too.

Now that you’re likely sold on the why part let’s get into the how, shall we?

Bridging to Sonic

Having an in-house decentralized bridge is the trick to getting ahead of the curve.

I’ve got three reasons why: a) your blockchain won’t be isolated from other networks within the space b) interoperability will be enhanced, and c) the overall health of the ecosystem will be boosted.

Most existing solutions compromise on either decentralization, security, or speed. Sonic’s native bridge to Ethereum, however, checks off all these boxes as a prerequisite.  

The bridge—Sonic Gateway—facilitates ERC-20 token transfers between Ethereum and Sonic. There’s no master key, which means only you, the user, will have access to and control over your funds on the bridge.

Here’s how you can go about with it:

• Head over to gateway.soniclabs.com
• Connect your web3 wallet (The team recommends using Rabby)
• Choose the origin chain (Ethereum in this case) and the destination chain (Sonic)
• Pick the asset you wanna bridge and specify the number of tokens
• Check if you’re receiving the same amount on the other chain
• Approve the transaction

And that’s it! Your assets are now being bridged over.

Assets bridged through the Gateway are processed in intervals called heartbeats. This ticks the gas efficiency box as it makes sure many assets are bridged together.

From Ethereum to Sonic, there’s a heartbeat every ten minutes [which is obviously slower than solutions like Optimism but wayyyy better than others from the clan like Polygon].

Uno reverse: Transfers from Sonic to Ethereum take up to 1 hour [Sonic is the pick of the litter here].

But well, let’s admit, sometimes, you just can't wait.

That’s where Sonic’s Fast Lane feature comes into play. For a small fee, you can process your Gateway transaction instantly, skipping the usual waiting time between heartbeats.

No delays, no missed opportunities. The best part? Fast Lane doesn’t just help you. By using Fast Lane, you’re technically adding an extra heartbeat to the Gateway. This means everyone else’s queued assets also get bridged immediately.

On-chain experiences are not always as smooth as butter. When you fly, you fly, but when you fall, you fall hard, really really hard.

The same goes with DeFi infra too. Experiencing glitches is part and parcel of the tale. To cater to this, the Sonic Gateway has a built-in fail-safe mechanism.

Using this, you can retrieve your bridged assets on the original chain just in case Sonic or its Gateway experiences a failure.

Ermm... if you’ve got trust issues like me, I know what’s gonna do the trick here — I just gotta tell you that the bridge is the brainchild of giga brain Cronje.

When he came back to Fantom from his hiatus, the team underlined that he only handled the designing and development of the new Sonic network and the new native bridge [Sonic Gateway].

In the man’s words,

“Like a true ‘first-class citizen,’ Sonic Gateway has a fail-safe where users can recover their funds on the chain they bridged from.”

That being said, you should also note that the fail-safe mechanism can't be accessed right off the bat. It activates only after 14 consecutive days of failed Gateway operations. This period is immutable and can't be altered whatsoever.

Sonic’s own validator network operates the Gateway by running clients on both Sonic and Ethereum. This ensures that the Sonic Gateway is as decentralized as the Sonic chain itself, eliminating the risk of centralized manipulation.

EOD, prevention is better than cure, ain’t it?

Concluding thoughts

At the behest of sounding like an on-chain philosopher, gotta say that the guys at Sonic are taking the game way too seriously (in a good way).

The mainnet has just been rolled out and the team has already bagged consumer application integrations including Curve, Pendle, SwapX, KyberSwap, Unstoppable Domains, Layer3, PaintSwap, and LlamaPay, among others.

These guys also recently closed a $10 million strategic funding round led by Hashed.

Others backing them up? A power-packed roster including UOB Ventures, Signum Capital, and Aave Foundation, as well as angel investors Stani Kulechov, Robert Leshner, Michael Egorov, Fernando Martinelli, Tarun Chitra, and Sam Kazemian.

Fantom's journey has been one of highs and lows. It has seen its own days of glory as a touted Ethereum killer, and at the same time, it’s also witnessed its ecosystem get completely rattled by the bear-instigated wounds.

But like any protagonist worth their salt, Fantom has embraced its rebirth arc with Sonic — a speed-focused, hybrid blockchain that's blending the strengths of L1 and L2.

Sonic ain’t just a rebrand; it's a statement.

By combining lightning-fast performance, ultra-low fees, and Ethereum interoperability via a specialized bridge, Sonic is signaling to users that it's here to play the long game.

Plus, with its developer-friendly revenue-sharing model, the groundwork is being laid for innovation to flourish.

The new chain is already live and kicking, anon. Make sure to be a part of the action — it’s “lights, camera, engagement” time. You won’t wanna miss it!