Sonic Labs Announces Mainnet Launch of Its New L1 Blockchain That Is EVM-Compatible and Has a Fee Monetization Feature for Application Developers

Sonic Labs is a rebrand of the Fantom Foundation, previously tasked with developing the Opera blockchain, which has FTM as its native token.

Sonic Labs, formerly known as the Fantom Foundation, has announced the mainnet launch of its new L1 blockchain, Sonic. The network is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and boasts a unique fee monetization feature for application developers.

While Sonic Labs is a rebrand of the entity behind the Opera blockchain, which has FTM as its native token, the newly rolled-out network implements several upgrades, including faster transaction finality and a new token.

“Sonic represents the culmination of over two and a half years of hard work by the technical team, who optimized the entire execution stack of the Opera Chain, as well as many other improvements such as to the database/storage. This makes operating nodes far easier and cheaper,” wrote Sonic Labs CEO Michael Kong in an X post early Wednesday.

On a 1:1 basis, FTM holders can exchange their tokens for S, Sonic’s native cryptocurrency, which has several roles within the network, including paying for transaction fees, running validators, and participating in governance, according to Wednesday’s announcement.

Sonic was created to succeed Opera because “the technological advancements we achieved with our Sonic technology could not be fully integrated into Opera through a simple soft-fork upgrade. Therefore, we decided to launch an entirely new network with a new token,” according to a September 2024 blog post.

The Sonic blockchain, which aims to be the fastest settlement layer for digital assets, has executed nearly 304,000 total transactions and boasts roughly 24,000 unique wallet addresses at press time.

For those developing applications, Sonic has a fee monetization feature that rewards developers with up to 90% of network fees generated from the application. “This allows you [developers] to focus on scaling your app and growing your user base without the constant pressure of fundraising or securing additional financing,” according to Sonic’s mainnet announcement.

Max Good, an investment research analyst at venture firm Decentral Park Capital, told Unchained, “I think Sonic’s fee monetization approach could be a very interesting way to incentivize and onboard developers, and it already supports [programming languages] Solidity and Vyper, which means it will be a familiar environment for most smart contract devs.”

Aave Chan Initiative, a service provider for the largest lending protocol, posted early Wednesday to the platform’s governance forum a temperature check on whether to deploy Aave V3 on Sonic, citing the new blockchain’s fee monetization feature for applications as a potential and additional source of income for Aave.

Good also speculated about potential new decentralized finance primitives from Sonic Labs’ CTO Andre Cronje, who is an influential figure in the DeFi space, having helped build Yearn and introduce a widely used tokenomics design named ve(3,3).

Airdrop to incentivize network activity

In a bid to attract crypto users, developers, and liquidity providers, Sonic Labs has implemented a points system as part of the network’s airdrop of approximately 190.5 million S tokens.

Given that the FTM token is currently trading at $1.22 and FTM holders can swap for S tokens on a 1:1 basis, the total amount allotted to Sonic’s airdrop is valued at roughly $232 million.

“Designed to reward meaningful user engagement within the Sonic ecosystem, these points incentivize a wide range of activities, such as early adoption, long-term loyalty, asset ownership, and active participation with apps across the platform,” Sonic’s governance documentation states.

Earned by bridging assets onto the Sonic blockchain, maintaining liquidity within the ecosystem, and deploying cryptocurrencies on whitelisted applications, Sonic’s points are distributed across multiple seasons, with the first one ending around June 2024.

While some are looking to stress-test the network, others are excited to start transacting on Sonic because of the airdrop.

L1 space gets increasingly populated

The L1 ecosystem is a competitive space, with several blockchains having already launched their mainnet, including Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Aptos, Sui, and Ton. The number of L1 blockchains stands at over 240, according to market data from CoinGecko.

Hyperliquid, an L1 dedicated to trading perpetual derivatives, recently conducted its token generation event, while other L1s are expected to roll out their mainnet in 2025, including Glue, Monad, and Berachain.

“The big question is who can build the next [generation] ecosystem of sticky [decentralized applications] to gravitate users,” added Good, of Decentral Park Capital.