What is Sonic (formerly Fantom)? The Logic Behind the New Public Chain's Rebranding
Fantom's rename to Sonic is not simply a name change but a complete reconstruction from the underlying architecture to brand positioning. With a new chain built from scratch, a new tech stack, tokenomics, and a developer fee-sharing mechanism, it attempts to re-enter the main stage of public chain competition as "the fastest EVM-compatible chain in history." In the words of its core development team, Sonic is not a patch-style upgrade to the old system but an entirely newly built public chain.
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Understanding Why Fantom Changed Its Name — Superficially a Name Change, Essentially an Engine Swap
Fantom was once a star public chain during the 2020-2021 DeFi bull market, with total value locked (TVL) peaking close to $8 billion. However, after core developer Andre Cronje briefly exited in 2022 and market confidence declined, TVL plummeted to less than $100 million.
The core contradiction is that Fantom's underlying architecture could no longer deliver the performance expected of a "new public chain." Facing competition from new-generation Layer 1s like Solana and Avalanche in terms of throughput and scalability, Fantom's DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) architecture, while innovative, gradually exposed bottlenecks in storage and execution during actual ecosystem growth.
On August 2, 2024, the official announcement renamed the project to Sonic Labs, while revealing plans for the Sonic mainnet launch in Q4. The significance of this step is: rather than carrying the old Fantom name for a repair-style upgrade, it is better to start afresh with a new brand and compete for market attention with a "second venture" attitude.
What constitutes completion of understanding: Understand that Sonic is not "Fantom 2.0" but an independent chain built from zero.
Looking at the Tech Upgrade — What Makes It the "Fastest EVM Chain"
Sonic's goal is straightforward: to become a Layer 1 with sub-second transaction finality, throughput exceeding 10,000 TPS, while remaining EVM-compatible.
There are three core technology components:
① Lachesis Consensus (DAG + aBFT) The technical legacy from the Fantom era continues — an asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus based on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), supporting nodes to generate events in parallel, with ordering completed through Lamport timestamps and event reference relationships, without waiting for the traditional "block packaging-block production" cycle. Transaction confirmation time can be compressed to approximately 0.7 seconds.
② SonicVM + JIT Compilation The core improvement in the virtual machine is Just-In-Time compilation — compiling smart contract EVM bytecode into machine code in real time for execution, while introducing "super-instructions" that merge common operation sequences to improve CPU execution efficiency. Officials claim up to 400,000 TPS in controlled environments, with a realistic mainnet target of 10,000 TPS.
③ Carmen Data Storage (SonicDB) Storage requirements for validator nodes drop from 2,000GB to about 300GB, and archive nodes from over 11TB to below 1TB. The core approach is to eliminate the traditional Merkle state tree, adopt flat key-value storage, and introduce "live pruning" to discard old states, significantly lowering node hardware barriers.
What constitutes completion of understanding: Be able to name the three technical pillars that make Sonic "fast" — DAG consensus, JIT compilation, flat storage.
Understanding the Token Transition — How FTM Becomes S
FTM → S migration occurs at a 1:1 ratio. The initial supply of S is 3.175 billion tokens, identical to the total supply of FTM.
Migration Window: The Opera FTM → S bridging channel will close at 5:00 PM GMT on June 30, 2026. After that, unmigrated FTM can no longer be upgraded to S tokens via this channel.
New Token Mechanism:
Starting six months after mainnet launch, an annual inflation of 1.5% (approximately 47.625 million S) will be minted for network operations and ecosystem development. Unused annual allocations will be 100% burned.
The validator staking APR target is set at 3.5%, primarily relying on unused Opera block reward shares for the first four years to avoid early excessive inflation.
FeeM Mechanism: If a DApp does not participate in fee sharing, 50% of the gas fees generated by users in the application will be burned directly, incentivizing developers to join FeeM and earn a share.
What constitutes completion of understanding: Know that FTM and S are exchanged 1:1 and that migration has a deadline of June 30, 2026.
Understanding the Strategy Behind the Rebrand — Can the "Second Venture" Succeed?
The core strategy of Fantom renaming to Sonic can be summarized in three points:
① Abandoning the Brand Burden, Adopting a New Narrative "Fantom" was tagged by the market as a "declining public chain" after 2022. By renaming to Sonic Labs, launching the S token, and introducing large-scale airdrops and incentive programs, it's equivalent to telling a new high-performance L1 story under a new brand.
② Retaining the Ecosystem with "Developer Fee Sharing" The FeeM mechanism promises to return up to 90% of network gas fees to application developers, allowing project teams to earn sustained income based on actual on-chain usage without relying on external funding. This "revenue sharing by traffic" model is a scarce design in Web3 public chains.
③ Airdropping 200 Million S Tokens to Activate Users The airdrop pool is divided into two tracks: Sonic Points for ordinary users, encouraging interaction, holding, and historical activity; Sonic Gems for developers, encouraging the launch of DApps with real usage volumes, while controlling sell pressure through a 270-day linear vesting and an early unlock burn mechanism.
What constitutes completion of understanding: Understand that Sonic rebranded to "change identity and enter the arena," not just "change a name and continue."
Risk Warnings
TVL has fallen from a peak of $8 billion to approximately $90 million. The current ecosystem foundation is far from what it once was; whether FeeM and airdrops can pull funds and users back remains unknown.
The tokenomics involve a complex game of "inflation + burn." The dynamic balance between 1.5% inflation and FeeM burns exists, and investors and developers may need time to adapt and verify it.
The shadow of cross-chain security has not fully dissipated. The Fantom era experienced the Multichain incident. Although Sonic has designed a decentralized gateway and Fail-Safe protection mechanism, it has yet to face a major security test.
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Next Steps
If you are an FTM holder on Fantom, first confirm whether your tokens have been migrated 1:1 to S, paying special attention to the bridge closure deadline of June 30, 2026. If you are a developer, you can monitor the Innovator Fund launched by Sonic Labs and the application portal for the FeeM mechanism. By building applications with real usage volume, you can earn continuous income from gas fee rebates.
