Fantom to Sonic: Did the ‘Rebrand’ Actually Deliver?

The Chains That Outgrew Themselves

Scalability was the pitch. Faster blocks, cheaper fees, and more efficient consensus mechanisms were supposed to push chains like Fantom, Near, and Algorand into the spotlight. But the gap between design and adoption never quite closed. Transaction speeds improved. Usage didn’t. Fantom’s TVL plummeted from $7.5B in early 2022 to under $1B by mid-2023, reflecting not just market downturns but a failure to retain developers long-term.

By mid-2023, it was clear that scaling blockchains wasn’t just about engineering. It was about economics, tooling, and incentives. Fantom had reached a ceiling, not because the chain failed technically, but because no one wanted to build past it.

So the team behind Fantom scrapped it. In its place came Sonic, a full protocol reset packaged as a rebrand, but structured more like a clean break. New chain. New incentives. New validator logic. Same founding team.

Sonic isn’t the first chain to change names. But it’s one of the few that publicly admitted the need for a do-over. Fantom wasn’t scaling in practice. Sonic promises that it can.

The question now is whether that promise holds up. Did Sonic actually create a faster, more scalable blockchain, or did it just move the bottleneck somewhere else?

Fantom’s Limits

By late 2022, Fantom still looked alive on paper, active validators, cheap fees, decent throughput, but under the surface, things were stalling. Builders weren’t sticking around. Apps were shipping, but rarely staying. Total value locked declined.

Part of the problem was structural. Fantom Opera rewarded validators, not developers. Builders relied on one-time grants or ecosystem incentives, but there was no way to earn recurring fees at the protocol level. Revenue models became guesswork. Some apps leaned on token speculation. Others just stopped updating.

Staking didn’t help. It was inflexible, with lockups that discouraged delegation and no real liquid staking market to offset that friction. Fantom’s 14-day staking lockups deterred flexible delegation, leaving it without a liquid staking ecosystem like Ethereum’s Lido, which further stifled user engagement. Ethereum had Lido. Fantom had illiquidity.

Even the tooling started to feel out of date. Fantom was technically fast, but deploying apps meant dealing with outmoded flows, slower indexers, and scattered documentation. Developers faced slow indexers and fragmented documentation, with outdated workflows that lagged behind Ethereum’s polished tooling ecosystem. Developers looking for polish found a network still stuck in its early-stage ergonomics.

The frustrations weren’t just under the hood. Reddit posts and Discord threads from early 2023 show the tone shifting. Complaints moved from bugs to direction. “Why are we still here?” became a common thread. It wasn’t a matter of performance. It was a matter of incentives. Apps that brought users in had no reason to stay once the initial push faded.

The foundation could’ve kept patching Opera. Instead, they chose to start over.

The Rebuild: What Sonice Did Differently

Sonic started with a post-mortem. Every new component, the consensus model, the virtual machine, the bridge, was a direct response to the gaps in Fantom Opera.

Finality was first. Fantom’s Lachesis model struggled under high load, with validators sometimes forced to reorder transactions. Sonic fixed that by moving to asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (ABFT). Validators no longer wait on each other to propose the next block. Sonic’s optimized Lachesis consensus reduces validator dependencies, enabling transactions to finalize in ~720ms with no reorg risk, a direct upgrade from Fantom’s reordering issues under high load. Transactions finalize in seconds, and there’s no rollback risk. That’s speed AND consistency.

Storage came next. On Opera, pruning old state data required validators to go offline. That made upkeep expensive and clunky. Sonic rewrote the virtual machine and storage layer around a live-pruned database. Validators discard history without downtime. The Carmen database cuts validator storage needs by ~90%, allowing live pruning without downtime, a leap over Fantom’s clunky offline pruning process. Archive nodes handle the rest. It’s cleaner, cheaper, and better aligned with long-term scalability.

Bridging was another pain point. Fantom relied on third-party bridges that broke often and introduced unnecessary risk. Sonic launched with the Sonic Gateway, a native Ethereum bridge that batches transactions on “heartbeats” and includes a 14-day fail-safe. If Sonic ever goes dark, users can still recover funds on Ethereum. There’s also a Fast Lane feature for instant transfers, which lets anyone skip the line by paying for a batch update.

And then there’s Fee Monetization. On Fantom, builders got grants, if they got noticed. On Sonic, they earn. Up to 90% of the gas fees from their smart contracts flow back to them automatically. No token launches, no separate app chains, no clawbacks. Just recurring protocol-level revenue tied to usage.

Fantom offered tools. Sonic builds around outcomes. That’s the difference.

Is It Actually Faster? A Reality Check

Sonic’s tech stack makes bold claims: 400,000 transactions per second, sub-second finality, and zero risk of reorgs. On paper, it’s one of the fastest chains in crypto. But performance isn’t measured in whitepapers. It’s measured in usage.

Start with the bridge. The Sonic Gateway sounds airtight: native, secure, heartbeat-driven. But users moving assets in from Ethereum still run into a basic loop: no $S, no gas (no pun intended). If you bridge USDC but don’t hold S, you can’t claim your funds. There’s no default faucet, and no automated fallback. The result: stuck assets and frustrated users. That’s not a speed problem. It’s a UX hole that cancels out the performance gains.

Same with transaction volume. Sonic says it can process hundreds of thousands of transfers per second. So far, it hasn’t had to. Activity has been low enough that real-world TPS data isn’t even a factor yet. While Sonic claims 400,000 TPS, testnet data shows only ~130 TPS in public scenarios, and mainnet’s $1.2B TVL hasn’t yet driven enough volume to test these limits. The infra might be ready, but the load isn’t there to test it. Claims of scale without usage don’t mean much. To put Sonic’s speed in perspective, Solana achieves ~65,000 TPS and Ethereum Layer-2s like Arbitrum handle ~40,000 TPS, but Sonic’s real-world performance remains unproven at scale.

Buckle up, crypto crew @SonicLabs just made a serious move. Native USDC adoption exploded to $600 million in under a week, pushing total value locked to a massive $1.2 billion. This Layer-1 chain, freshly rebranded from Fantom, is showing off some serious speed with 400,000… pic.twitter.com/Q5CW9ZaYah

— Just Mat💥 (@0xMatG) May 18, 2025

Finality is fast. Transactions do settle in about a second. But that only matters if the user flow supports it. In practice, wallet integrations still lag, some interfaces take longer to reflect state changes, and onboarding feels closer to a testnet than a polished chain. The speed is real, but the experience isn’t smooth enough to feel fast.

Even the airdrop system, designed to drive engagement, creates friction. Tokens are vested into NFTs. Burn mechanics encourage delayed claiming. There’s a secondary market for vesting positions. It’s clever. But to most users, it’s just complicated. Complexity dilutes urgency and adoption.

Sonic may be faster under the hood. But until that speed translates into fluid interaction, the chain won’t feel faster to the people who matter.

Sonic’s Real Innovation: Its Economic Model

Sonic talks about performance, but what actually makes it different is economic.

Fee Monetization (FeeM) flips the model most Layer-1s use. Instead of routing all network fees to validators and hoping developers find a way to monetize, Sonic pays builders directly. If you deploy a contract and people use it, you get paid. Up to 90% of the fees your app generates go straight back to you. No side deals. No grant committees. No pre-mined treasuries.

It’s not a new idea. Web2 figured it out years ago: YouTube pays creators based on engagement, not promises. Sonic just ports that logic to smart contracts.

Fantom relied on grants to attract developers. That model has a shelf life. Builders get the check, deploy the app, and leave when the incentives run out. It attracts volume, not commitment. Sonic doesn’t offer up-front money. It offers recurring revenue tied to usage. That creates a different kind of builder. Someone invested in long-term adoption because it pays long-term rewards.

The network doesn’t care if you’re DeFi, gaming, or governance. If your contracts get used, you earn. That alignment is rare. It removes the need for app chains. It removes the need for token speculation. You don’t have to pitch a narrative. You just need users.

Sonic is betting on builders who stick around because the chain pays them to stay.

Conclusion

Sonic isn’t a rebrand in the usual sense. It didn’t slap a new name on a struggling chain and keep pushing. It wiped the board clean with a new consensus, new economics, new everything.

But users don’t experience DAGs or virtual machines. They experience bridges, wallets, apps that work or don’t. That’s where Sonic still has to prove itself. The infrastructure is fast. The code is live. The incentives are different. But scalability doesn’t come from architecture alone. It comes from adoption that sticks. Sonic’s $1.2B TVL and native USDC adoption show early traction, but without sustained transaction volume, its scalability claims remain theoretical.

Sonic built the chain Fantom was supposed to be. Whether that matters now depends on whether anyone builds with it. Fantom turned into Sonic to fix itself. What comes next depends on whether devs believe it’s worth staying fixed.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is Sonic blockchain?

Sonic is a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain built by the team behind Fantom. It replaces Fantom Opera with new infrastructure focused on speed, sub-second finality, and real economic incentives for developers.

Is Sonic just a rebrand of Fantom?

No. Sonic is a complete technical reset, not just a name change. While it shares the same founding team and offers a 1:1 FTM-to-S token migration, it runs on a new consensus model and economic system.

How fast is Sonic compared to other blockchains?

Sonic claims up to 400,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality. In practice, current usage hasn’t pushed the chain to those limits yet, but transaction settlement is visibly fast.

What is Sonic’s Fee Monetization (FeeM) program?

FeeM is a system that pays up to 90% of gas fees to app developers. It’s designed to give builders sustainable, protocol-level revenue without needing to launch a token or raise external funding.

How does Sonic improve on Fantom’s user experience?

Sonic fixes key issues from Fantom by introducing live pruning for validators, native bridging through the Sonic Gateway, and better economic alignment with developers. That said, bridge UX and onboarding still present some friction points.Sonic’s native Gateway and live pruning reduce friction, but gas requirements for bridging and wallet UI delays still hinder seamless user flows.

Can I use my FTM tokens on Sonic?

Yes. Users can convert FTM to S tokens at a 1:1 ratio using supported platforms and bridges. Major wallets like Rabby and Ledger already support Sonic.