Fantom Teases Sonic Upgrade and Ecosystem Revival Efforts

Sonic is expected to further expand the scale of the Fantom blockchain, aiming to process up to 2,000 transactions per second.

Fantom Teases Sonic Upgrade and Ecosystem Revival Efforts

On the evening of March 25, 2024, Fantom Foundation unveiled new details regarding the Sonic upgrade, promising updates that will address the scalability issues facing the Fantom blockchain.

Fantom shared that the current version of the project, deployed in December 2019 as Opera, can process 200 transactions per second with confirmation times under 600 milliseconds — surpassing Ethereum's 12 TPS and 60-second confirmation times at that time.

As a result, Opera helped Fantom become one of the leading blockchains in the crypto industry, achieving a record TVL of $10 billion in early 2022. However, during periods of increased usage, Opera's limitations became evident with frequent congestion, negatively impacting user experience.

Fluctuations in Fantom's TVL. Source: DefiLlama (March 26, 2024)

Expectations and disappointments surrounding Andre Cronje's Solidly project in Q1/2022 also significantly dampened community interest in Fantom, culminating in the collapse of the Multichain bridge in mid-2023 due to legal issues.

Nevertheless, over the past two years, the Fantom team has asserted its commitment to finding a solution to the network's scalability issues, achieving it with the Sonic upgrade. According to Fantom, Sonic can handle up to 2,000 transactions per second, reducing data storage costs by 90% while maintaining confirmation times under 1 second, thereby increasing blockchain performance tenfold. This blockchain version is currently in the closed testnet stage.

Not stopping there, Fantom aims to use Sonic to develop a shared sequencer for other Layer-1 and Layer-2 solutions, aiming to reposition Fantom as a community-focused project. Simply put, a shared sequencer is a block processing protocol for multiple rollups simultaneously.

Fantom CEO Michael Kong estimates that the Sonic upgrade will be deployed by late summer or early autumn this year.

Moreover, Kong mentioned plans to soon publish a governance proposal outlining milestones to prepare for Fantom's reboot, including:

• Implementing cross-chain bridges supporting EVM chains and ensuring security for users.
• Simplifying staking and liquid staking processes, reducing unlock times to 14 days and unlocking $1 billion in value for circulation into liquid staking solutions.
• Establishing funding programs for projects across the ecosystem, covering areas from DeFi to decentralized social networks and AI.
• Building Parallel FVM, a Fantom Virtual Machine version enabling parallel transaction execution.
• Applying zk-SNARKs technology to reduce transaction verification costs.
• Creating a stablecoin to foster ecosystem growth.

FTM token prices have shown strong growth recently as confidence among cryptocurrency investors gradually returns, with high hopes pinned on the Sonic upgrade.

Chart of FTM/USDT on Binance at 11:30 AM on March 26, 2024