Sonic (S)

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Historical price evolution of Sonic

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Sonic has its origin in the Fantom project, founded in 2018 by South Korean computer scientist Dr. Ahn Byung Ik, who established both the Fantom company and the Fantom Foundation. In June of that same year the ICO was held, raising $40 million through the sale of 40% of the total supply of 3,175 million FTM, with Andre Cronje acting as Chairman of the Technical Council. In 2019, Dr. Ahn left the project and Michael Kong assumed leadership as CEO, whilst Cronje became an external technical adviser.

On 27th December 2019, Fantom's Opera mainnet was launched, an EVM-compatible network based on the Lachesis aBFT consensus mechanism. The project experienced significant growth when the Fantom Foundation launched its first DeFi incentives programme on 30th August 2021 with 370 million FTM, catalysing an explosion of TVL that reached over $7,930 million in March 2022, at which point FTM reached its historical ATH of approximately $3.24-3.48.

In March 2022, Andre Cronje announced his withdrawal from the crypto ecosystem, causing a massive drop in TVL and FTM price. However, in November 2022 Cronje returned and published a financial update from the Fantom Foundation showing over 450 million FTM and assets equivalent to several hundred million dollars, guaranteeing around 30 years of operations. A new setback came on 6th July 2023 when the Multichain bridge, Fantom's main bridge with other networks, suffered an exploit of over $126 million following the arrest of Multichain's CEO by Chinese authorities, who had left the servers uncontrolled. This caused Fantom's TVL to fall from $364 million to $67 million, leading to the permanent closure of protocols such as Geist Finance.

In February 2024, Fantom's TVL hit bottom at $63 million, a decline of 99.2% from its peak of $7,930 million in 2022. Recovery began on 23rd May 2024 when the Fantom Foundation announced the creation of Sonic Foundation and Sonic Labs, closing a $10 million round led by Hashed with participation from SoftBank and Signum Capital. In June 2024, Fantom's governance approved the transition to Sonic with 99.9% of votes in favour, including the 1:1 conversion of FTM to S and the reduction of the minimum staking period from one year to two weeks. On 1st August 2024, the Fantom Foundation officially rebranded as Sonic Labs, keeping Fantom's Opera network operational in parallel.

On 8th September 2024, Sonic's testnet recorded a transaction finality of 720 ms, the fastest level documented for an EVM blockchain up to that point. Sonic's mainnet launched on 18th December 2024 with the S token active, beginning the 1:1 conversion of FTM to S and introducing the Fee Monetisation (FeeM) model, which distributes up to 90% of transaction fees to dApp developers. Simultaneously, the airdrop of 200 million S (~6% of supply) began in Season 1.

Sonic's growth was notable from its launch: on 16th January 2025, Binance completed the conversion of FTM to S for its users and TVL exceeded $250 million. By 27th March 2025, TVL reached $973 million, a growth of 2,951% from the $31.91 million on 1st January 2025, with Aave, Silo Finance and Beets leading the ecosystem. The complete migration from FTM to S concluded on 10th May 2025, automatically converting all holders who had not done so manually at a 1:1 ratio. Season 1 of the airdrop ended on 18th June 2025, after driving over $1,000 million in TVL, immediately giving way to Season 2 which extended until 1st November 2025. In September 2025, Mitchell Demeter was named CEO of Sonic Labs, CMCC Global contributed an ecosystem fund of $25 million and Sonic Labs announced a token buyback of $6 million. In October 2025, Circle launched its native USDC bridge on Sonic through the CCTP v2 protocol. November 2025 brought both challenges and developments: the Beets DEX suffered an exploit of $426,000 (5.8 million S) although all tokens were returned before 15th January 2026, whilst Flying Tulip, Andre Cronje's DeFi super-app, launched on Sonic following a private round of $25.5 million at a valuation of $1,000 million.

Sonic is a layer 1 blockchain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that represents the evolution of the Fantom Opera network, launched in December 2024. Its technical architecture is based on the Lachesis aBFT (Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus mechanism, which operates on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. This design allows transactions to be processed asynchronously without requiring strict sequential order as in traditional blockchains, achieving transaction finality of under one second and a theoretical capacity of up to 10,000 transactions per second with fees under $0.01.

Sonic's main differentiator is its Fee Monetisation (FeeM) model, which allows decentralised application developers to claim up to 90% of transaction fees generated by their applications. The native S token inherits the total supply of FTM through a 1:1 conversion from the Fantom Opera network, maintains a supply without a fixed maximum cap and generates inflation through staking rewards. The network incorporates Sonic Gateway, a native bridge to Ethereum with fail-safe security mechanisms, and supports native USDC through Circle's CCTP v2 protocol, facilitating cross-chain transfers.

To drive ecosystem development, Sonic has the Innovator Fund, which allocates up to 200 million S tokens to encourage decentralised application adoption. The Fantom Opera chain remains operational for users who have not completed migration to Sonic. The project has the participation of Andre Cronje, creator of Yearn Finance, who serves as Chief Technology Officer of Sonic Labs.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.