Sonic Blockchain: What Is It and How Does It Work?

Sonic: The Ultra-Fast L1 EVM Blockchain That Revolutionized Fantom

The world of cryptocurrency is in constant flux, with new blockchains emerging to promise superior performance and innovative features. Whilst Ethereum inaugurated the era of smart contracts, it still suffers from significant speed limitations—roughly 15–30 transactions per second (TPS) on its base layer—and exorbitant costs when the network becomes congested.

Projects such as Polkadot have wagered on interoperability between various parallel blockchains (known as parachains) to surmount these hurdles, whilst others have sacrificed a degree of decentralisation to bolster the speed at which blocks are approved.

Today, a new contender is garnering attention as a potential “Ethereum killer”: Sonic, a next-generation blockchain born from the Fantom team’s experience and spearheaded by the Web3 legend Andre Cronje.In this article, we shall explore what Sonic is and how it works, discovering a blockchain that bets on speed, security, and user experience.

The Motivation Behind Rebranding Fantom to Sonic

Sonic traces its lineage back to the Fantom project. Once a pioneer, Fantom reached the zenith of its success in 2022, establishing itself amongst the leading “fast Layer-1s” (the base layer blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum) with a capitalisation of over $10 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL)—a metric used to measure the total capital held within a protocol.

Despite its cutting-edge architecture for its time, Fantom eventually faced several critical issues that gradually eroded its initial allure. These difficulties were exacerbated primarily by the lack of native stablecoins (cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets like the Dollar) and, crucially, the absence of secure native bridges—the tools used to transfer assets between different blockchains. Following exploits that hit third-party bridges (such as Multichain), this deficiency triggered a significant flight of capital from the ecosystem, culminating in a decline in confidence that began in late 2022.

Faced with these tribulations, the rebranding to Sonic was not merely a cosmetic name change but a strategic necessity. It represented a “full protocol reset”—a “clean break” from the past — to rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up and redesign the network’s economy, learning from historical errors.

The objective behind Sonic’s inception was crystal clear: to transition from a blockchain that was fast and cheap but lacking in security and reliability (Fantom) to one with a completely restructured architecture, equipped with parallel execution, secure native bridges, a renewed economic model, and an ecosystem that is far more inviting for software developers.

What is Sonic?

Sonic is a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain platform that is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). In plain English, this means it can support the same smart contracts and applications as Ethereum, but it functions far more rapidly and efficiently.

Launching in 2025 as the evolution of the Fantom project, Sonic immediately made headlines with its record-breaking figures: the network claims to be capable of handling up to 400,000 transactions per second (TPS) with a finality (the time it takes for a transaction to be irreversible) of under one second. By comparison, Ethereum without external scaling solutions processes mere dozens, whilst even notoriously fast blockchains like Solana aim for tens of thousands of TPS.

Everything is powered by the native token $S, which is used to pay network fees, stake (lock up tokens to secure the network), and participate in the platform’s governance.

From a conceptual standpoint, Sonic presents itself as a monolithic blockchain: it does not use “sharding” (splitting the network into smaller pieces) or parallel chains like Polkadot. Instead, it aims to enhance performance on a single network by optimising every technological layer.

Under the Bonnet: Sonic’s High-Speed Architecture

Sonic’s efficiency and velocity stem from a consensus architecture and data structure that transcend the limitations of traditional blockchains. This is achieved primarily through two technological innovations: Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (ABFT) and Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG).

Consensus is the crucial mechanism by which nodes (computers) in a decentralised network agree on the state of the ledger, whilst tolerating the presence of malicious actors (often termed “Byzantine nodes”).

In traditional blockchains, block approval is rigid and sequential: one block must be validated by a majority of nodes before the next can even be proposed. This sequential nature creates a bottleneck that limits throughput and increases latency (the delay before a transaction is finalised).

To overcome this, Sonic implements ABFT, which offers:

Imagine a traditional blockchain as a chain of railway carriages: each carriage (block) must be hitched in single file, one after the other. Whilst orderly, in computing terms, this is extremely slow.

Sonic, thanks to its advanced consensus system (ABFT), allows “validators” to work together in parallel, utilising a data structure known as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).

How the DAG Works: The Web of Consensus

Parallel and Immediate Validation: Unlike a chain, where everyone must agree on a single block at a time, in a DAG, all validators can add new nodes to the web simultaneously.

This eliminates the need for a single point of congestion, allowing data to flow simultaneously across the network, ensuring maximum efficiency and speed. Sonic’s approach combines the security of ABFT consensus with the flexibility of the DAG, transforming the sequential bottleneck typical of traditional blockchains into a parallel superhighway for data.

$S: Tokenomics That Reward Developers

Sonic’s innovation is not limited to its “hardware”; it extends to its economic operating system. The native token, denoted $S$, is essential to network security and governance, serving as a fee currency, a staking currency, and a voting currency.

Beyond these traditional uses, the tokenomics of $S introduces a novel feature called Fee Monetisation (FeeM).

The Fee Monetisation (FeeM) mechanism marks a significant shift in how developers are rewarded within the Sonic ecosystem. It is a system designed to directly value developers’ contributions, allowing applications that sign up to the programme to receive up to 90% of the transaction fees (gas) generated by their on-chain operations.

This model transforms network fees from a mere operating cost into a direct source of remuneration, creating a concrete link between an application’s activity and the project’s economic sustainability. It introduces an incentive model based on two fundamental principles:

The programme is already live and has distributed over 2 million $S tokens to more than 230 DApps. Coupled with EVM compatibility, this system makes Sonic a beautiful platform for development teams, offering an environment that combines high technical performance with tangible economic incentives.

Balancing the Books: Inflation vs Deflation

The economic model of the $S token has been meticulously engineered to achieve a dynamic balance between the inflation necessary for security and strategic deflation to preserve value.

From an inflationary perspective, the issuance of $S is fundamental to maintaining the protocol’s security. Since validators must be incentivised to lock up their tokens (staking) and protect the network, the model envisages a fixed annual issuance of approximately 1.75% once initial funds are exhausted.

To offset this issuance, Sonic employs a series of strategic deflationary mechanisms that “burn” tokens (permanently removing them from circulation) and directly tie supply to network activity. The most significant mechanism concerns transaction fees:

This tokenomics structure for $S is thus designed to establish a sustainable equilibrium: it guarantees constant, modest long-term inflation to fund network security, whilst simultaneously offering—through various burn mechanisms—the opportunity for a significant reduction in the circulating supply.

Conclusions

Sonic emerges as a next-generation blockchain, founded upon a triple pillar of innovation: performance, compatibility, and economics.

Its ultra-fast performance is guaranteed by state-of-the-art architecture that pairs Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) consensus with a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) data structure. This eliminates the sequential bottlenecks typical of traditional blockchains while maintaining full compatibility with the EVM.

Added to all this is the Fee Monetisation (FeeM) system, which flips the dynamic on its head, transforming Sonic into a direct economic partner for DApps and creating a development incentive hitherto unseen in any other Web3 ecosystem.In light of what we have observed, it only remains to be seen whether this combination of high velocity and developer incentives will transform Sonic into the next significant evolution of the blockchain landscape and the definitive “Ethereum killer” that the market so desperately craves.