Approaching Day 50 and looking beyond

Transition and handover took longer than we originally anticipated and are still underway, though I’m pleased to announce that we are finally close to the finish line.
Crypto promised much originally, but never really delivered on its core premise of revolutionising financial services. Crypto Summer was a long time ago and people are mistaken to think we're in a crypto winter and that the seasons will simply change again. Even today, we have pseudo decentralised protocols operating with centralised points of failure, be that off-chain operations or simply a single point of failure with no clear back up. I've never been comfortable with anon teams myself either, and I know that's not very cypherpunk, but it's just never sat well with me. The crypto space never learnt how to embrace self-regulation to protect its users, much of the issues over the years have emerged from the “code is law” mantra being abused and it's quite frankly alienated many everyday, non-crypto-native users. The world has changed, the poles have shifted. Crypto Summer as we knew it, is never going to happen again. We need to adapt, and I’m confident we have everything we need to do it.
Over the last year, the total crypto market has nearly halved, shedding roughly 2 trillion USD in value. It didn't disappear, it just found a better home. What's left is nothing to be scoffed at, but we can't pretend DeFi or the promise of the future of finance is a story the world is willing to buy anymore. Even after the Iran war, the world rebalanced surprisingly well. China has reduced its imports, the USA has increased some of its own exports and by and large, we simply haven't experienced the physical shortages the start of the war heralded. The S&P 500 has again set records. AI Capex continues to balloon. And crypto is still kicking along. Blockchain technology companies need to grow up. Robinhood shot out of the gates with Robinhood Chain. Polygon is becoming a payments company. At Sonic, we have come to terms with the fact that without generating revenue, the best technology in the world doesn't matter as much as we need it to.
A live example landed last week. Aave has proposed winding down its Sonic deployment, alongside five other chains and around fifty low-adoption assets across its markets. Stani was explicit that it is not a judgement on any particular L1 or L2, and I take him at his word, because the underlying logic is the same one this letter is making. Our deposits on Aave had fallen to roughly $7.6 million and generated under $5,000 a quarter for them, which does not cover the cost of maintenance. It is a rounding error against Aave's $14 billion book and it is not going to move our numbers either. But I am not going to skip past it, because the lesson is exactly the one we are acting on. Integrations that exist for the announcement rather than the volume get pruned, and they should be. The remedy is not more integrations, it is products that generate revenue on our own chain.
So where to from here? There is a lot that can and will be said about the operations of the business. A fuller operational review will follow. In the interim, the high-level shape. We are running four special projects, each with a dedicated owner and its own goals and OKRs, and revenue is the one that matters most. The core capabilities sit in-house and always have: protocol engineering, payments and FX operations, agentic infrastructure. These are experienced technical people and I have not needed to go looking for them. Where we partner is on specialised infrastructure, cross-chain liquidity, specific new features, and front-end work. This note is about strategic direction, and I am not going to invent delivery dates to fill a paragraph. What I will commit to is the shape of the next one. In Q4, each of the four projects will be published with a named owner, its milestones, and the conditions under which we stop working on it. If something isn't working, we would rather say so and move the people onto something that is, and you should be able to hold us to that.
"No one cares about the tech." This was touted often as Sonic came to terms with the market reality and response to its actions. The fact is that people do care, just not in the same context which we were used to. Being the best L1 blockchain, with battle-hardened tech and an even sturdier team does matter, but only when it's positioned and sold as a relevant solution and not as an egotistical brag. On raw throughput we are not meaningfully differentiated anymore, and I don't think anyone is. Several chains can now put up numbers around the same range as ours. Benchmarks stopped being a moat a while ago and we should stop behaving as if they are. What the performance actually buys us is the right to be considered for a class of product that most infrastructure cannot support at all: regulated instruments with real settlement guarantees, cross-border flow at commercial volume, and agentic execution that doesn't fall over under load. Being the best blockchain is the entry requirement. It is not the business. The business is what we build on top of it, who we distribute it with, and whether it makes money.
That is what the performance is actually for. It gives us the opportunity to commodify and ship solutions that matter. We have to develop, launch and measure our business units’ performance as we test concepts directly with users in the traditional B2C way and simultaneously find the right supporters, distribution and market partners for B2B2C deals that deliver real volume and impact for blitz scaling those same concepts. Product market fit is the mission and it's not a one day task.
Payments - as mentioned above, the performance difference is clear. Couple that with FX trading and transform cross-border payments with certainty and at a fraction of the current costs and time; and we've got another highly competitive vertical we can leapfrog into. We have partnerships and working relationships with Frax, whose frxUSD we white-label as USSD, as well as Circle for USDC native onchain and are looking to use Spendl for onramping and enabling of Mastercard and spending functionality. This is an area we are aggressively pursuing and there are more conversations we have just started having which we can’t mention here yet. If you think we’ve missed you, please reach out to [email protected].
AI - more than a matter of national security, the ability to have agentic operations perform tasks and solve for user set goals is not a unique web3 opportunity, it's simply where some of the best ideas start. Like shopping for an agentic template, enabling compute and spend resources; and then sending it on its way across web2, web3 and the physical world. That's when it becomes exciting. Sonic has a new network and client upgrade busy being tested internally which includes a built-in MCP server and Priority Lanes (Sonic’s native transaction prioritization system). Fundamental building blocks for enabling hyper-scaling of AI agents and their goals.
Those of you who signed up for the original concept of Spawn as a developer tool will have received this news already, but the project has evolved to include two distinct product lines. Spawn Studio: Where protocols can submit for inclusion and support in the Sonic MCP server and where developers can build privately or publish their agentic templates. Spawn Marketplace: Where non-technical users can browse the marketplace or simply find the best or most relevant existing template, confirm the agent's mission, fund it, and send it on its way. We identified a list of key AI infrastructure requirements and have managed to include a large number of them in the upcoming releases. Spawn Studio is where we make these features available to technical developers and Spawn Marketplace is how we share them with non-technical users and make money together as well.
Perps & RWAs - The price and performance of dividend stocks over the last year has been astronomical. Our goal is to power 24/7 trading instead of 9:30am-4pm, near instant finality as opposed to T+1 or +3, and tighter spreads and better performance. We want to provide profitable differentiation to existing players by finding ways to leverage our technology in existing use cases. We are not trying to re-invent a new crypto primitive, we just want to deliver on the performance promise in a controlled, regulated, and accessible way so that traditional financial operators can trust us and benefit from our technology. RWAs onchain, specifically those taking advantage of the renewable narrative are coming soon and we hope that regulated and KYC access to these products will be as successful as the promise of unregulated and unfettered access which was historically made.
Prediction Markets - DeFi summer was phenomenal because it was the first time we got a taste of the promise. Direct participants get direct benefits. Enough retail capital flowed in to sustain remarkable APYs. For a while the money printer went brrr for founders and retail users. Until it didn't anymore. Today, we see similar hype with meme tokens and prediction markets, most of it running on attention rather than anything durable underneath. We've been building prediction market infrastructure to enhance existing platforms and have also had a few interesting conversations around the licensing of SonicVM and Sonic DB, both are commercially licensable products which can bring direct improvements and dramatic cost savings to existing stacks. We’ve also been building our own prediction market, more of a demo for the Prediction Market as a Service for the B2B go-to-market which we’re exploring, but also as a functional application layer. One that has a bit of the direct participation promise which harkens back to the spirit of DeFi without trying to recreate it. Monte Carlo sims and hands-on testing are underway. I have been working on this since before I joined, initially on my own. Rather than run it as a side project, I brought it in as a native Sonic application, because it is a better demonstration of what the chain can do than anything I could describe in a letter. Hyper-local and hyper-social markets. No white paper, no hyping it. Yes/No (working title) is in closed beta on Sonic Testnet now. We will open it up for wider stress testing shortly and will post signup details when we do.
Strategic Partnerships - A meaningful share of these first fifty days has gone into conversations with investors across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America. The most useful signal from those meetings is not the level of interest or available support, it's the change in what gets asked. Two years ago the questions were about listings and market makers. Today they're about revenue lines, unit economics, regulatory posture, what our go-to-market plan is and who our distribution partners are. That's a harder conversation and a better one; and it's the conversation we want to be having.
Several of these are long horizon mandates, the kind of strategic partnerships and capital that underwrites a business rather than trades a narrative, and a number have indicated they want to participate in the next stage of Sonic's growth on exactly those terms. Some will run validators and help secure the network, others bring distribution or market access into the verticals described above, and that is a materially better arrangement for us than a straightforward directional bet. We're being deliberate about who we bring on and on what basis, because the composition of a cap table is a strategic decision and not just a fundraising one.
What I will say is that the appetite is real, it's global, and it's contingent on us doing what this letter describes: shipping products that generate revenue and reporting on them honestly. The capital follows the execution.
How this benefits S - I have been asked, reasonably, where the token sits in all of this. The honest answer is that it sits at the end of the sequence rather than the beginning. Buybacks, burns, fee sharing, flywheel mechanics: none of these are hard to design and all of them are easy to announce. What makes any of them real is revenue, because every one is ultimately just a mechanism for routing revenue somewhere. Without revenue they are transfers out of the treasury dressed up as value accrual and we have all watched enough of those to know how they end.
That is why there is no tokenomics announcement in this letter. Not because we haven't thought about it, but because announcing it now would be precisely the sugar high this letter argues against. The order is: ship products, generate revenue, then route it. As the business units described above start producing revenue we can point to, the mechanism for how that reaches S holders gets designed and published. Judge us on the first two, because they are what make the third an engineering question instead of a marketing one.
A big thank you goes out to our hard-working technical teams. We aren't there yet, but building on the shoulders of giants means we can see the future we're striving for. Another big thank you to the loyal Sonic diamond hands - I hope we can make you proud, and I remain indebted to so many of you for reaching out directly, offering support, sometimes even just kind words of encouragement really makes the day's challenges seem more achievable. If I or someone else has missed getting back to you, please let us know. It's not intentional, we're all trying and the whole team is evolving.
One ask before I close:
If you think any part of the above is wrong or needs adjusting, say so directly. These letters are quarterly from here and will start to grow in detail. They're also much more useful to us if you provide direct feedback. Please remember that we are reading and processing everything you send to [email protected].
Cheers for now.

- Matt Visser, CEO

Approaching Day 50 and looking beyond

Transition and handover took longer than we originally anticipated and are still underway, though I’m pleased to announce that we are finally close to the finish line.
Crypto promised much originally, but never really delivered on its core premise of revolutionising financial services. Crypto Summer was a long time ago and people are mistaken to think we're in a crypto winter and that the seasons will simply change again. Even today, we have pseudo decentralised protocols operating with centralised points of failure, be that off-chain operations or simply a single point of failure with no clear back up. I've never been comfortable with anon teams myself either, and I know that's not very cypherpunk, but it's just never sat well with me. The crypto space never learnt how to embrace self-regulation to protect its users, much of the issues over the years have emerged from the “code is law” mantra being abused and it's quite frankly alienated many everyday, non-crypto-native users. The world has changed, the poles have shifted. Crypto Summer as we knew it, is never going to happen again. We need to adapt, and I’m confident we have everything we need to do it.
Over the last year, the total crypto market has nearly halved, shedding roughly 2 trillion USD in value. It didn't disappear, it just found a better home. What's left is nothing to be scoffed at, but we can't pretend DeFi or the promise of the future of finance is a story the world is willing to buy anymore. Even after the Iran war, the world rebalanced surprisingly well. China has reduced its imports, the USA has increased some of its own exports and by and large, we simply haven't experienced the physical shortages the start of the war heralded. The S&P 500 has again set records. AI Capex continues to balloon. And crypto is still kicking along. Blockchain technology companies need to grow up. Robinhood shot out of the gates with Robinhood Chain. Polygon is becoming a payments company. At Sonic, we have come to terms with the fact that without generating revenue, the best technology in the world doesn't matter as much as we need it to.
A live example landed last week. Aave has proposed winding down its Sonic deployment, alongside five other chains and around fifty low-adoption assets across its markets. Stani was explicit that it is not a judgement on any particular L1 or L2, and I take him at his word, because the underlying logic is the same one this letter is making. Our deposits on Aave had fallen to roughly $7.6 million and generated under $5,000 a quarter for them, which does not cover the cost of maintenance. It is a rounding error against Aave's $14 billion book and it is not going to move our numbers either. But I am not going to skip past it, because the lesson is exactly the one we are acting on. Integrations that exist for the announcement rather than the volume get pruned, and they should be. The remedy is not more integrations, it is products that generate revenue on our own chain.
So where to from here? There is a lot that can and will be said about the operations of the business. A fuller operational review will follow. In the interim, the high-level shape. We are running four special projects, each with a dedicated owner and its own goals and OKRs, and revenue is the one that matters most. The core capabilities sit in-house and always have: protocol engineering, payments and FX operations, agentic infrastructure. These are experienced technical people and I have not needed to go looking for them. Where we partner is on specialised infrastructure, cross-chain liquidity, specific new features, and front-end work. This note is about strategic direction, and I am not going to invent delivery dates to fill a paragraph. What I will commit to is the shape of the next one. In Q4, each of the four projects will be published with a named owner, its milestones, and the conditions under which we stop working on it. If something isn't working, we would rather say so and move the people onto something that is, and you should be able to hold us to that.
"No one cares about the tech." This was touted often as Sonic came to terms with the market reality and response to its actions. The fact is that people do care, just not in the same context which we were used to. Being the best L1 blockchain, with battle-hardened tech and an even sturdier team does matter, but only when it's positioned and sold as a relevant solution and not as an egotistical brag. On raw throughput we are not meaningfully differentiated anymore, and I don't think anyone is. Several chains can now put up numbers around the same range as ours. Benchmarks stopped being a moat a while ago and we should stop behaving as if they are. What the performance actually buys us is the right to be considered for a class of product that most infrastructure cannot support at all: regulated instruments with real settlement guarantees, cross-border flow at commercial volume, and agentic execution that doesn't fall over under load. Being the best blockchain is the entry requirement. It is not the business. The business is what we build on top of it, who we distribute it with, and whether it makes money.
That is what the performance is actually for. It gives us the opportunity to commodify and ship solutions that matter. We have to develop, launch and measure our business units’ performance as we test concepts directly with users in the traditional B2C way and simultaneously find the right supporters, distribution and market partners for B2B2C deals that deliver real volume and impact for blitz scaling those same concepts. Product market fit is the mission and it's not a one day task.
Payments - as mentioned above, the performance difference is clear. Couple that with FX trading and transform cross-border payments with certainty and at a fraction of the current costs and time; and we've got another highly competitive vertical we can leapfrog into. We have partnerships and working relationships with Frax, whose frxUSD we white-label as USSD, as well as Circle for USDC native onchain and are looking to use Spendl for onramping and enabling of Mastercard and spending functionality. This is an area we are aggressively pursuing and there are more conversations we have just started having which we can’t mention here yet. If you think we’ve missed you, please reach out to [email protected].
AI - more than a matter of national security, the ability to have agentic operations perform tasks and solve for user set goals is not a unique web3 opportunity, it's simply where some of the best ideas start. Like shopping for an agentic template, enabling compute and spend resources; and then sending it on its way across web2, web3 and the physical world. That's when it becomes exciting. Sonic has a new network and client upgrade busy being tested internally which includes a built-in MCP server and Priority Lanes (Sonic’s native transaction prioritization system). Fundamental building blocks for enabling hyper-scaling of AI agents and their goals.
Those of you who signed up for the original concept of Spawn as a developer tool will have received this news already, but the project has evolved to include two distinct product lines. Spawn Studio: Where protocols can submit for inclusion and support in the Sonic MCP server and where developers can build privately or publish their agentic templates. Spawn Marketplace: Where non-technical users can browse the marketplace or simply find the best or most relevant existing template, confirm the agent's mission, fund it, and send it on its way. We identified a list of key AI infrastructure requirements and have managed to include a large number of them in the upcoming releases. Spawn Studio is where we make these features available to technical developers and Spawn Marketplace is how we share them with non-technical users and make money together as well.
Perps & RWAs - The price and performance of dividend stocks over the last year has been astronomical. Our goal is to power 24/7 trading instead of 9:30am-4pm, near instant finality as opposed to T+1 or +3, and tighter spreads and better performance. We want to provide profitable differentiation to existing players by finding ways to leverage our technology in existing use cases. We are not trying to re-invent a new crypto primitive, we just want to deliver on the performance promise in a controlled, regulated, and accessible way so that traditional financial operators can trust us and benefit from our technology. RWAs onchain, specifically those taking advantage of the renewable narrative are coming soon and we hope that regulated and KYC access to these products will be as successful as the promise of unregulated and unfettered access which was historically made.
Prediction Markets - DeFi summer was phenomenal because it was the first time we got a taste of the promise. Direct participants get direct benefits. Enough retail capital flowed in to sustain remarkable APYs. For a while the money printer went brrr for founders and retail users. Until it didn't anymore. Today, we see similar hype with meme tokens and prediction markets, most of it running on attention rather than anything durable underneath. We've been building prediction market infrastructure to enhance existing platforms and have also had a few interesting conversations around the licensing of SonicVM and Sonic DB, both are commercially licensable products which can bring direct improvements and dramatic cost savings to existing stacks. We’ve also been building our own prediction market, more of a demo for the Prediction Market as a Service for the B2B go-to-market which we’re exploring, but also as a functional application layer. One that has a bit of the direct participation promise which harkens back to the spirit of DeFi without trying to recreate it. Monte Carlo sims and hands-on testing are underway. I have been working on this since before I joined, initially on my own. Rather than run it as a side project, I brought it in as a native Sonic application, because it is a better demonstration of what the chain can do than anything I could describe in a letter. Hyper-local and hyper-social markets. No white paper, no hyping it. Yes/No (working title) is in closed beta on Sonic Testnet now. We will open it up for wider stress testing shortly and will post signup details when we do.
Strategic Partnerships - A meaningful share of these first fifty days has gone into conversations with investors across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America. The most useful signal from those meetings is not the level of interest or available support, it's the change in what gets asked. Two years ago the questions were about listings and market makers. Today they're about revenue lines, unit economics, regulatory posture, what our go-to-market plan is and who our distribution partners are. That's a harder conversation and a better one; and it's the conversation we want to be having.
Several of these are long horizon mandates, the kind of strategic partnerships and capital that underwrites a business rather than trades a narrative, and a number have indicated they want to participate in the next stage of Sonic's growth on exactly those terms. Some will run validators and help secure the network, others bring distribution or market access into the verticals described above, and that is a materially better arrangement for us than a straightforward directional bet. We're being deliberate about who we bring on and on what basis, because the composition of a cap table is a strategic decision and not just a fundraising one.
What I will say is that the appetite is real, it's global, and it's contingent on us doing what this letter describes: shipping products that generate revenue and reporting on them honestly. The capital follows the execution.
How this benefits S - I have been asked, reasonably, where the token sits in all of this. The honest answer is that it sits at the end of the sequence rather than the beginning. Buybacks, burns, fee sharing, flywheel mechanics: none of these are hard to design and all of them are easy to announce. What makes any of them real is revenue, because every one is ultimately just a mechanism for routing revenue somewhere. Without revenue they are transfers out of the treasury dressed up as value accrual and we have all watched enough of those to know how they end.
That is why there is no tokenomics announcement in this letter. Not because we haven't thought about it, but because announcing it now would be precisely the sugar high this letter argues against. The order is: ship products, generate revenue, then route it. As the business units described above start producing revenue we can point to, the mechanism for how that reaches S holders gets designed and published. Judge us on the first two, because they are what make the third an engineering question instead of a marketing one.
A big thank you goes out to our hard-working technical teams. We aren't there yet, but building on the shoulders of giants means we can see the future we're striving for. Another big thank you to the loyal Sonic diamond hands - I hope we can make you proud, and I remain indebted to so many of you for reaching out directly, offering support, sometimes even just kind words of encouragement really makes the day's challenges seem more achievable. If I or someone else has missed getting back to you, please let us know. It's not intentional, we're all trying and the whole team is evolving.
One ask before I close:
If you think any part of the above is wrong or needs adjusting, say so directly. These letters are quarterly from here and will start to grow in detail. They're also much more useful to us if you provide direct feedback. Please remember that we are reading and processing everything you send to [email protected].
Cheers for now.

- Matt Visser, CEO

Source:https://twitter.com/soniclabs/status/2085511635050045520