Phantom Phantom: Sonic — updated network from the 'father of DeFi'

In December 2024, after rebranding, the Sonic mainnet, an EVM-compatible layer-one blockchain (L1), was launched. The new direction of the old Fantom project was headed by the “father of DeFi” André Cronje.

In February 2025, attention to the ecosystem and the Sonic token increased significantly. There are several reasons for this: user interest in the future airdrop, the network’s competitive performance, and management’s promises to return to the era of the “DeFi summer”

In the new material from ForkLog, we recall the path of Krone, his contribution to the industry, and also analyze the Sonic technology, incentive program, and project ecosystem.

The “Father of DeFi” Workshop

*“I agree: even if our technology is excellent, it doesn’t mean much on its own these days – it’s about distribution and usability. That’s what we’re focusing on as we build a horizontal, composable DeFi stack across all of our projects,” Yearn Finance creator and Sonic chief architect André Cronje wrote in X.

This was his response to an investor under the nickname kook, who claims that in the modern crypto industry, technology has become just a means of promoting a product

Cronje is known for his straightforwardness. From the very beginning of his work in the field of cryptocurrencies, he criticized its negative aspects — an abundance of misinformation, the race for hype, and a toxic community. Acknowledging these problems didn’t stop him from being an enthusiast of blockchain technology.

Cronje’s first education is a lawyer – he graduated from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. He continued his studies there at the private Institute of Computer Learning, where he later began to teach himself

From 2006 to 2018, Cronje held positions from programmer to CTO in a number of South African IT companies. Then he took his first steps in the digital asset market, working as a code analyst in various ICOs for the CryptoBriefing portal, and later as an advisor to a number of venture funds and crypto startups: Wanchain, Fusion, and Fantom.

Cronje’s real popularity and status as the “father of DeFi” was brought by the Yearn Finance protocol. Released in 2020, the yield aggregator used Vaults, which are vaults that automatically distributed deposited stablecoins among lending services, offering users passive income with relatively high APYs.

According to the creator, it took $42,000 to launch Yearn, and twice as much for audit and hosting. Cronje had to take out a loan against his house and raise an additional $20,000.

Immediately after the start, the project was hacked, but the attack was survived (все subsequent startups of the DeFi architect also attracted hackers, as магнит)

The release of the token in June 2020 marked a new round in the development of Yearn. Cronje then made a surprising statement:

"We have issued YFI: a completely worthless token that is not backed by anything. Again, it has zero financial value. No pre-mining, no ICO, you won’t be able to buy it, it won’t be on Uniswap, there will be no trading. We don’t have those tokens either."

Whether these words were sincere or cunning manipulation, YFI rose from $3 by 35,000% in a week after the start of trading on Balancer. The asset appeared on Uniswap and soon broke the record among altcoins, reaching ~$77,000 at its peak. As of February 26, 2025, the value of YFI is ~$5,700

At this stage, Cronje managed to create the basis for the further development of decentralized finance. Despite frequent criticism of him — and his own harsh remarks about the industry — he built effective mechanisms that were trusted.

However, in 2022, Cronje announced that DeFi will inevitably be subject to regulation, and he himself is leaving the industry. For many decentralization enthusiasts, these words sounded like betrayal.

For two years, the “father of DeFi” has been absent from the public field and has only appeared in the news a few times during all this time. Finally, in early 2025, already as Sonic’s chief DeFi architect, Cronje shared the “real reason” for his disappearance. Since 2021, he has been actively influenced by the SEC. First, she requested information about investors and beneficiaries of Yearn Finance, and then it turned to investigations against Cronje

*“After two years of dealing with this every month, enduring endless sleepless nights and stress, I chose [officially leaving the industry]. I’m sure many here would say it wasn’t worth giving up, but I also believe that anyone who says that has never been in a similar situation. You get all the negativity, but you don’t get any benefits,” he admitted.

In the same publication, Cronje confirmed his loyalty to the principles of DeFi and stated that his statements about the need for regulation were misunderstood.

“I just couldn’t be public, but I’ve kept working tirelessly all these years, and that’s why I’m finally close to releasing my new primitives. […] My last posts before “disappearing” were about regulated DeFi. Most people didn’t even read these articles, they just saw the words ‘cryptocurrency regulation’ in the headline and thought I was an agent of the government,” he said.

Clarifying his 2022 statement, the DeFi architect pointed out the distinction he made back then: if regulation aimed at decentralized smart contracts is simply impossible in nature and only leads to the expulsion of developers from the industry, as is the case with it, then off-chain third parties (биржи брокеры) can indeed be subject to oversight

Fantom “hit the technical ceiling”

In light of the easing of regulatory pressure in the United States, in particular a softer attitude towards tokens, experts point to a possible DeFi renaissance. For example, Bernstein analysts expect a flow of liquidity from the meme coin sector to decentralized finance, NFTs, and gaming tokens.

This was a good backdrop for the rebranding and technological renewal of Cronje’s brainchild, Fantom.

Fantom Foundation Ltd. was registered in early 2018 in South Korea. The founder and CEO of the project was Ahn Byung Ik, known in the country as the creator of the SikSin restaurant rating application. Initially, the Fantom Foundation team consisted mainly of South Korean developers, and the first partnerships were concentrated in the local food technology industry.

Subsequently, the Fantom Foundation changed its jurisdiction to the Cayman Islands, and the management team became international. The positions of CEO and CIO were taken by Australian Michael Kong, and Cronje was the chief DeFi developer.

The mainnet was launched in December 2019, and in the fall of 2021, Fantom entered the top 10 projects in terms of TVL.

The network belongs to a family of blockchains built on the DAG architecture. The implementation of the DAG-BFT mixed consensus allows for parallel processing of transactions with a high finalization rate and ensures the operation of the network in conditions where up to a third of nodes are faulty. Similar models are used by Aptos, Sui, IOTA, and Hedera Hashgraph projects, but Fantom is the first to support DAG-based smart contracts.

Each node stores its own local DAG from the event blocks that contain the transactions. Nodes do not send blocks to each other to find consensus, as they do in linear blockchains. Instead, validators periodically exchange transactions and events, synchronizing them within the same epoch.

The main reason for launching Sonic in the team is called the complexity of further technical upgrade of Fantom. If the stated throughput at the start was about 4500 TPS, and later - more realistic ~2000 TPS, then in the case of Sonic, they promise up to 10,000 TPS. The transaction finalization speed will be less than 1 second at a cost of less than $0.01. These indicators allow us to compete with the new L1 - Monad and Berachain.

! Main features of the Sonic network. Data: Sonic Labs.The goal of Sonic Labs, which is in charge of the development of Sonic, is to provide a platform for fast and cost-effective transactions with a focus on DeFi and game mechanics

The developers of Sonic have provided the possibility of combining liquidity with Ethereum. The native cross-chain bridge Sonic gateway allows the transfer of ERC-20 tokens between Sonic and the network of the second largest cryptocurrency by capitalization

Gateway includes a fault tolerance mechanism that protects users’ assets. If the gateway fails, the funds can be recovered on the Ethereum network after 14 days.

! Scheme of backup return of 1 ETH in case of failure. Data: Sonic Labs.Assets are moved at regular intervals – “ticks” – to efficiently use the gas: every 10 minutes from Ethereum to Sonic and every hour in the opposite direction. With the Fast Lane feature, you can speed up the transaction by increasing the fee.

SonicVM is fully EVM compatible and allows the use of Solidity and Vyper programming languages

Another important part of the update was the Carmen solution. This system manages data based on the actual needs of the network, reducing the storage requirements of validator nodes from 2000 GB to 300 GB.

Optimization reduces operational overhead for nodes by allowing more nodes to participate in network validation. Historical data that no longer needs frequent access can be compressed or moved. In addition, Carmen reduces storage requirements for archive nodes from 11 TB to less than 1 TB

Staking, Farming, Airdrop

According to André Cronje, when the missing DeFi mechanics are implemented in Sonic, the network will look “like one big platform for high-frequency trading.” The following features and incentives are planned to be introduced:

• fee switch for dapps developers at 90%;
• customizing transaction fees for application owners;
• free transactions for new users;
• Account abstraction with walletless access.

In a tweet posted on the day of the mainnet launch, Sonic’s chief technology officer revealed:

*“Will be launching my dapps in phases, bringing back ICOs, ‘fair launches’ and retroactive airdrops to show what Sonic is really capable of.”

Many of these elements are already implemented in Fantom. Back in August 2021, the Fantom Foundation announced the launch of a new incentive program for DeFi service developers. In October, it was expanded to include projects in the field of GameFi.

FTM token holders can convert them to S tokens at a 1:1 ratio after the mainnet launch.

The growing interest in the future airdrop, supported by nostalgia for the “summer of DeFi”, has noticeably revived the ecosystem. The new future reward campaign has implemented a tried-and-true strategy – a bias towards DeFi, mini-games, NFTs, and, of course, “memo mania”.

The decline of the entire crypto market at the end of February 2025 repeats the familiar scenario of the times of the Arbitrum airdrop farming in 2023. Then, despite the unstable market situation, DEX tokens, lending platforms, and other derivative elements of the ecosystem showed steady growth.

According to Sonic’s documentation, ~200 million S will be distributed to those who hold and use approved assets in various DeFi applications on Sonic, thereby increasing liquidity.

! Approved Assets for Airdrop Farming S. Data: Sonic Labs.There are three main dynamics for airdrop farming:

• passive actions – holding of approved assets;
• active use of approved tokens in DeFi mechanics;
• Developer Rewards – Sonic Gems.

On February 7, 2025, the Meme Mania Competition incentive program was launched, which will last until March 8. 1 million liquid Origin Sonic (OS) tokens will be distributed to the top 125 holders of the 8 winning meme coins as a reward for dedicated community members.

! Meme token dashboard on the Sonic network by capitalization. Data: Sonic Labs.Thanks to community activism, the ecosystem is growing. The leading DEX Shadow Exchange showed outstanding price dynamics with monthly growth rates of ~1400% and TVL close to $140 million.

It is followed by decentralized trading exchange SwapX with a twofold increase in a month and a TVL of ~45 million.

Top-10 projects in the Sonic ecosystem by TVL. Data: DefiLlama. Among derivative exchanges for futures trading, Navigator took the lead. According to CoinGecko, the NAVI token grew by ~500% in 30 days.

Conclusions

With the release of new projects like Monad, Berachain and the updated Sonic, the competition in L1 is intensifying. In the rapidly growing variety of blockchain and cryptocurrency applications, each network can carve out a niche. Sonic relies on high speed, low fees, and liquidity aggregation, which strengthens its position in the DeFi segment.

The upcoming summer airdrop will show how the management of the updated blockchain has adjusted to the new realities of incentive programs and tokenomics balance.