Sonic Labs: Can the High Performance of the New Chain Be Realized?

After changing its name to Sonic Labs, the once-popular public chain project Fantom has officially launched its new mainnet, Sonic. Compared with the previous Opera chain, Sonic has undergone drastic changes in both the consensus layer and the storage layer, and has introduced technical means such as live pruning, node synchronization acceleration, and database weight loss to achieve higher performance and lower node burden. In terms of cross-chain, Sonic Gateway adopts the method of validators running clients on both Sonic and Ethereum, and introduces decentralized and tamper-proof "Fail-Safe" protection to ensure the security of cross-chain assets.

In terms of token economics, Sonic sets the same initial supply (total amount) as FTM to ensure that old coin holders can get S at a 1:1 ratio. Starting six months after the mainnet goes online, 1.5% (about 47.625 million S) will be issued every year for network operations, marketing, DeFi promotion, etc., for six years. However, if this part of the tokens is not used up in a certain year, they will be 100% destroyed to ensure that only the additional part is actually invested in construction, rather than being stored in the foundation.

In order to hedge the inflationary pressure caused by this part of the increase, Sonic designed three destruction mechanisms:

Fee Monetization Burn: If a DApp does not participate in FeeM, users will directly destroy 50% of the gas fees in transactions generated by the application; this is equivalent to imposing a higher "deflation tax" on applications that "do not join the cooperative sharing", encouraging DApp to actively participate in FeeM.

Airdrop Burn : It takes 270 days for the vesting period to fully obtain the 75% airdrop shares; if the user chooses to unlock in advance, a portion of the airdrop shares will be lost, and these "deducted" shares will be directly destroyed, thereby reducing the circulation of S in the market.

Ongoing Funding Burn: 1.5% annual issuance for network development. If the tokens are not used up in the current year, the remaining tokens will be burned 100%. This can prevent the foundation from hoarding coins and limit the long-term crowding out of tokens by certain members.

Overall, Sonic attempts to ensure ecological development funds through "controllable issuance" on the one hand, and "destruction" at multiple points on the other hand to curb inflation. The most noteworthy is the "burning" under the FeeM mechanism, because it is directly linked to the participation level and transaction volume of DApps, which means that the more applications do not participate in FeeM, the greater the deflation on the chain; on the contrary, the more FeeM applications there are, the less "deflation tax" there is, but the developer share will increase, forming a dynamic balance between profit sharing and deflation.

It is worth noting that although "high TPS" is not new in the competition of public chains, it is still one of the core indicators to attract users and project parties. Fast and smooth interactive experience can usually lower the threshold of users to blockchain, and also provide possibilities for application scenarios such as complex contracts, high-frequency transactions, and metaverse games. In addition, Fantom once fell into trouble due to cross-chain in the Multichain incident. Therefore, Sonic's cross-chain strategy has also attracted much attention. The official technical documents list the cross-chain Sonic Gateway as a key technology and specifically introduce the security mechanism.