Sonic Labs Founders Including Andre Cronje Quit Board as New CEO Pledges to Get '1% Better' Daily

Sonic Labs said its three founding board members — Andre Cronje, Michael Kong and David Richardson — are resigning from the board, and named Matt Visser as chief executive officer and Kosta Kourkoumelis as chief operating officer, in a leadership overhaul at the blockchain network whose token and onchain activity have collapsed over the past year. The company disclosed the changes in a post on X.

Sonic's S token traded at about $0.031, near a fully diluted valuation of $120 million, down roughly 97% from its January 2025 record of $1.03, according to CoinGecko data. The token fell about 30% over the past 30 days, compared with a 19% decline in Bitcoin over the same period. Total value locked on Sonic, a measure of the assets deposited in its DeFi protocols, stood at about $20 million, down some 98% from a peak of $1.14 billion in May 2025, according to DefiLlama.

The reshuffle removes from business decision-making the figures who built the network — Cronje, the DeFi developer behind Yearn Finance who steered Fantom's rebrand into Sonic, chief among them — and pairs that exit with public commitments to transparency, compliance and rebuilding holder trust. It caps a leadership unwind that has run for more than a year at a network that once ranked among the larger Layer 1 ecosystems by deposits.

A board-led structure unravels

Cronje, Kong and Richardson "remain invested in Sonic's success" and are handing off their responsibilities in full, the company said, adding that the three "will no longer make business decisions for the organization."

The departures complete a turnover that began in late 2025. Sonic Labs, formerly the Fantom Foundation, appointed Mitchell Demeter as CEO in September 2025, with Kong moving to chief information officer and Cronje serving as chief technology officer. Demeter and business head Evan Owens resigned in February 2026, after which the board — including Cronje and Kong — took over operations directly. Visser and Kourkoumelis now replace that board-led structure.

Visser said his priority is "operational discipline and earning back trust, in that order," rather than a roadmap reveal.

"I am not here to promise an instant turnaround," Visser said in the announcement. "I am here to make Sonic 1% better every single day and let that compound."

Acknowledging the slide

The company did not frame the changes as a recovery, instead stating plainly that "the token is down" and "community sentiment is down," and saying it would not spin the position.

Sonic laid out four commitments: publishing decisions and the reasoning behind them; standing up a dedicated risk and compliance committee; treating S holders as stakeholders rather than "a vanity metric"; and cutting back on announcements in favor of plainer updates. It directed disclosures and concerns to a dedicated email address.

Sonic said its engineering output did not slow through the leadership changes. The company reported 400 pull requests merged into its main GitHub branch so far in 2026, two official releases shipped, a 2.2.0 release in active development with six release candidates, and a private testnet under testing.

Cronje remains tied to the ecosystem through Flying Tulip, the DeFi exchange he is building on Sonic, which raised capital at a $1 billion valuation earlier this year even as the S token slid — a split between his new venture's valuation and the network's that the board change does not resolve.

Visser and Kourkoumelis are largely untested in public-facing leadership of a network this size, and the "1% better" framing sets no measurable near-term targets against which holders can judge progress.

Sonic said it would be judged as a team over the next 100 days. Whether onchain deposits and token holders return will be the clearest test of whether the new leadership's pledges translate into activity.