Fantom’s Rebranded Blockchain Sonic Labs Launches Testnet

The blockchain formerly known as Fantom, now called Sonic Labs, has launched its testnet today.

Users transacting on the Sonic Labs testnet have created more than 70 million blocks, at an average block time of 0.45 seconds, and 11 transactions per second.

The time to finality, meaning the time between when a transaction is submitted and when it's confirmed, was around 0.76 seconds, making it one of the fastest EVM blockchains, said the team. For reference, the Ethereum blockchain has a finality time of 75 seconds.

The FTM token–which will eventually get faded out for the upcoming S token–did not react positively to the news and is down 1.2% to $0.37, despite a brief spike. That said, FTM been enjoying a healthy uptrend in the past year and has gained 88%.

Fantom rebranded to Sonic in August this year. The company announced it would be creating Sonic Labs, which would focus on developing dApps, while the Sonic Foundation would handle governance and treasury functions.

Along with the rebrand, the company announced a $10 million round led by Hashed, along with crypto personalities like Stani Kulechov, and Michael Egorov.

Sonic Labs also launched a bounty program called Sonic Boom which aimed to fuel growth by pushing developers to build out more exchanges, lending, tooling and payment solutions.

The program will run until Nov. 4 and will reward 30 winners with Sonic Gems, which have ear tagged 37% of Sonic’s upcoming airdrop.