Fantom's Rebranded Layer 1 Sonic Goes Live

Fantom’s rebrand to Sonic is complete, with Sonic mainnet launching to the public today.

FTM holders can migrate to Sonic and convert their FTM tokens into the new chain’s native token, S, and get started with its ecosystem. S token staking is available, with governance “coming soon” according to Sonic Labs’ blog post.

There will also be an upcoming airdrop of S to users, with 190 million S, 6% of the total supply, worth $260 million at the time of writing. The S airdrop is set to be distributed based on “Sonic Points” for both passive and active users.

Sonic is an EVM-compatible layer-1, boasting up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), near-instant finality and is compatible with major wallet providers including Metamask, Rabby, and OKX.

Sonic raised $10 million in a strategic round in May, led by Hashed Fund and featuring angels such as Satni Kulechov of Aave, and Robert Leshner of Compound Finance.

The chain will be the successor to Fantom, which accumulated an all-time high of $8 billion in total-value locked in 2022. However, Fantom touted an average of $100 million in TVL throughout 2024, according to DeFiLlama.

The FTM token, which can be migrated directly for S, recently reached its highest price since 2022 in anticipation of the Sonic upgrade, eclipsing a $4 billion market capitalization earlier in December.

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