Original | Odaily Planet Daily
Author | Nan Zhi
Yesterday, Solana’s second-layer network Sonic announced that it had completed a $12 million Series A financing round. Compared to most EVM networks, Solana is known for its high performance. Why does it need a second-layer network, and how will Sonic create value for Solana? Odaily will interpret Sonic’s vision, characteristics, and recent participation opportunities in this article.
Project Interpretation
Why do we need Sonic?
Solana is known for its high performance, but with the increasing number of users, applications, and network activities, although it is not yet at a breaking point, individual network fees can skyrocket to tens or even hundreds of dollars. During the ORE mining period and the Meme coin craze, users experienced increased latency and failure rates, highlighting the necessity of scalability. Sonic provided a more detailed data analysis on this:
Firstly, in terms of the number of users, the number of wallet accounts increased from 100,000 in 2022 to 1 million in 2023, and is expected to reach 10 million in 2025, 25 million in 2026, and 50 million in 2027.
At the same time, the growth rate of DApp and DeFi activities is faster, with the number of transactions executed per month increasing from an average of 4,188,712 per day in January 2022 to 205,823,984 per day in January 2024 (Note: an increase of 48 times). Even with conservative estimates, it is expected that the daily transaction volume will exceed 4 billion by 2026.
Under such demand pressure, Solana L1’s current architecture’s throughput capacity will face significant challenges. Currently, under conditions of 2500-4000 TPS, Solana’s average ping time fluctuates between 6 seconds and 80 seconds, mostly around 40 seconds. In addition, historical data (from February to September 2023) shows that when TPS exceeds 4000, Solana’s transaction success rate is only between 70% and 85%. Apart from the physical latency and fluctuations caused by network conditions, the main reason is related to the increasing saturation of TPS.
Sonic further pointed out that, especially for full-chain games, the on-chain interaction of hundreds of thousands or even millions of users will severely impact Solana’s main chain performance. Sonic was created to solve the high-concurrency gaming performance needs on Solana.
Sonic stated that the first batch of game partners includes Lumiterra, Rage Erffect, JogoJogo, FoMoney, Kepler Homes, etc. In addition, Sonic has opened a funding program and will recruit more than twenty game partners to join the Sonic network.
Sonic Features
According to Sonic’s official documentation, Sonic is the first atomic SVM chain designed to create independent game economies on Solana, allowing game economies to scale and settle on Solana through Rollup. Transactions on Sonic do not require redeployment of Solana programs and accounts, and can directly benefit from Solana’s underlying services and liquidity.
Sonic is built on top of HyperGrid, Solana’s first concurrent scaling framework. HyperGrid aims to introduce customization and scalability while maintaining native composability with Solana. HyperGrid has rapid chain creation capabilities, and Sonic says that various narratives can be quickly built on HyperGrid. In addition, through HyperGrid’s interpreter, developers can seamlessly deploy DApps from EVM chains to Solana.
Finally, Sonic will develop a series of game growth, traffic, payment, and settlement infrastructure and provide game developers with specialized underlying code and practical tools.
Financing Details
On June 18, 2024, Sonic announced the completion of a $12 million Series A financing round, led by Bitkraft Ventures, with participation from OKX Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, Sanctor Capital, Cloud Nine Capital, Matt Sorg, and others. This round of financing valued the company at $100 million.
Odyssey Event
Sonic launched the Odyssey testnet event, scheduled to start at 12:00 on June 19 (UTC+8), where users can participate through the official website (click to jump). Sonic stated that Odyssey will be one of the most important activities in the ecosystem, and participating users may have the opportunity to receive potential airdrops.
However, due to unknown reasons, the Odyssey website is currently unable to redirect users, and the official response has not been provided on platforms like X and Discord. Odaily will update the tutorial in this article once the website is back to normal.
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