FTM Surges as Sonic Publishes Litepaper

Sonic Labs, the rebranded Fantom blockchain, published its litepaper on Oct. 14 and shared details on the FTM token migration, the underlying technology stack, and how users can participate in the upcoming airdrop.

Sonic’s governance token, $S, will be distributed via the protocol’s points-based airdrop, loyalty rewards for Opera users, and a 1:1 migration for FTM holders. FTM currently trades at $0.77, or a $2.4 billion valuation. The token is up 52% in the past 30 days.

Sonic launched its testnet in September, boasting an average block time of 0.26 seconds per block as of Oct. 5, and the litepaper claims it is capable of up to 900 million transactions in a single day, more than 20x Solana’s recent peak of 40 million transactions per day.

Sonic Labs acknowledges that its throughput capability far exceeds current demand, but believes that having the technology fully functional allows the ecosystem to focus on building out demand.

“Sonic’s objective is to drive demand to utilize the maximum number of transactions our network can effectively supply without causing disruption while charging enough per transaction to cover the emission rate of the network,” reads the litepaper.

The litepaper release comes as the network’s “Sonic Boom” campaign comes to an end. Sonic Boom is a bounty program that will conclude on Nov. 4 and distribute shares of Sonic Gems, akin to points, to the most influential applications in its ecosystem. The Sonic Gems will be distributed by winning projects to their users, and Gems holders will eventually be allocated 37.5% of the $S airdrop.

This approach is similar to Blast’s Gold system, where ecosystem dApps were allocated Gold based on their key metrics, and each dApp could then distribute the Gold to their users in whatever way the teams preferred.