{"id":21545,"date":"2025-02-26T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-26T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/a-phantom-reborn-sonic-a-revamped-network-from-the-father-of-defi\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T16:00:00","slug":"a-phantom-reborn-sonic-a-revamped-network-from-the-father-of-defi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/a-phantom-reborn-sonic-a-revamped-network-from-the-father-of-defi\/","title":{"rendered":"A phantom reborn: Sonic, a revamped network from the \u2018father of DeFi\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

In December 2024, following a rebrand, the Sonic mainnet was launched<\/a>\u2014an EVM-compatible layer-1 (L1) blockchain. The \u2018father of DeFi\u2019, Andre Cronje, has taken the helm of the new direction for the old Fantom project.<\/p>\n

In February 2025, attention to the Sonic ecosystem and token rose sharply<\/a>. Several forces are at work: users\u2019 anticipation of a future airdrop, competitive network metrics, and management\u2019s promise to bring back the era of the \u201cDeFi summer<\/span>\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This ForkLog piece revisits Cronje\u2019s path and his contribution to the industry, and examines Sonic\u2019s technology, incentive programme and ecosystem.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Inside the \u2018father of DeFi\u2019s\u2019 workshop<\/h2>\n
\n

\u201cI agree: even if our technology is superior, by itself it means little these days\u2014distribution and usability matter. That is exactly what we are focusing on, building a horizontal, composable DeFi stack across all our projects\u201d<\/em>, wrote<\/a> on X the creator of Yearn Finance and Sonic\u2019s chief architect, Andre Cronje.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He was replying to an investor under the nickname kook, who argued that in today\u2019s crypto industry technology has become merely a means of selling a product.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cronje is known for his bluntness. From the outset of his work in cryptocurrencies he criticised its downsides\u2014an abundance of misinformation, hype-chasing and a toxic community. Acknowledging these problems did not stop him from remaining a blockchain enthusiast.<\/p>\n

By training Cronje is a lawyer, a graduate of Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He continued his studies at the private Computer Training Institute there, where he later taught.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

From 2006 to 2018 Cronje held roles from programmer to CTO across several South African IT firms. He then took his first steps into digital assets, working as a code analyst on various ICOs for CryptoBriefing, and later as an adviser to a number of venture funds and crypto start-ups: Wanchain, Fusion and Fantom.<\/p>\n

The protocol that brought Cronje real fame\u2014and the title of the \u201cfather of DeFi\u201d\u2014was Yearn Finance. Launched in 2020, the yield aggregator used Vaults\u2014repositories that automatically allocated deposited stablecoins across lending services\u2014offering users passive income with relatively high APY<\/span>.<\/p>\n

According to the founder<\/a>, Yearn cost $42,000 to launch, and twice that for audit and hosting. Cronje had to take a loan secured against his house and raise an additional $20,000.<\/p>\n

Immediately after launch the project was hacked, but it survived the attack (every subsequent start-up by the DeFi architect seemed to attract hackers like a magnet).\u00a0<\/p>\n

The token\u2019s release in June 2020 marked a fresh phase for Yearn. Cronje then made an unexpected statement:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe have released YFI: a completely useless token, which is backed by nothing. We repeat: it has zero financial value. No premine, no ICO, you will not be able to buy it, it will not be on <\/em>Uniswap<\/em>, there will be no trading. We don\u2019t have these tokens either\u201d<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sincere or shrewd, those words were followed by a 35,000% price jump within a week of trading on Balancer, from $3. The asset appeared on Uniswap too and soon set an altcoin record, peaking at around $77,000. As of February 26, 2025, YFI trades<\/a> near $5,700.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At that stage Cronje had laid the groundwork for the further development of decentralised finance. Despite frequent criticism directed at him\u2014and his own sharp remarks about the industry\u2014he built effective mechanisms that earned trust.<\/p>\n

Yet in 2022 Cronje declared that DeFi would inevitably come under regulation, and that he was leaving the industry. To many decentralisation enthusiasts, this sounded like a betrayal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For two years the \u201cfather of DeFi\u201d stayed out of the public eye, surfacing only a handful of times in the news. Finally, in early 2025, already as Sonic\u2019s chief DeFi architect, Cronje shared<\/a> the \u201creal reason\u201d for his disappearance. Since 2021 he had been under pressure from the SEC<\/span>. At first it requested information about Yearn Finance\u2019s investors and beneficiaries; later it turned into investigations targeting Cronje himself.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cAfter two years of having to deal with this every month, enduring endless sleepless nights and stress, I chose [an official departure from the industry]. I am sure many here would say I shouldn\u2019t have given up, but I also believe anyone who says that has never been in a similar situation. You get all the negativity, but you get none of the benefits\u201d<\/em>, he admitted.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the same post Cronje reaffirmed his commitment to DeFi and said his comments about the need for regulation had been misunderstood.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI simply could not be public, but all these years I kept working tirelessly, and that is why I am finally close to releasing my new primitives. [\u2026] My last posts before \u2018disappearing\u2019 were about regulated DeFi. Most people didn\u2019t even read those articles, they just saw the words \u2018crypto regulation\u2019 in the title and decided I had become a government agent<\/em>,\u201d he fumed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Clarifying his 2022 statement, the DeFi architect drew a distinction: regulation aimed at decentralised smart contracts is simply impossible in natural conditions and only drives developers out of the industry\u2014as in his case\u2014whereas off-chain third parties (exchanges, brokers) can indeed fall under oversight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fantom \u2018hit a technical ceiling\u2019<\/h2>\n

With regulatory pressure easing in the United States, particularly a softer stance on tokens, experts point to<\/a> a possible DeFi renaissance. Analysts at Bernstein, for instance, expect<\/a> liquidity to flow from memecoins<\/a> into decentralised finance, NFTs and gaming tokens.<\/p>\n

This made for a timely backdrop to the rebrand and technical overhaul of Cronje\u2019s creation, Fantom.<\/p>\n

Fantom Foundation Ltd. was registered in early 2018 in South Korea. The project\u2019s founder and CEO was Ahn Byung Ik, known domestically for creating the restaurant-rating app SikSin. Initially, the Fantom Foundation team was predominantly South Korean developers, and early partnerships focused on the local foodtech industry.<\/p>\n

The Fantom Foundation later moved to the Cayman Islands, and the leadership became international. Australian Michael Kong took the CEO and CIO roles, with Cronje as lead DeFi developer.<\/p>\n

Mainnet launched in December 2019, and by autumn 2021 Fantom had entered the top ten projects by TVL<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The network belongs to the family of blockchains built on a DAG<\/span> architecture. Its hybrid DAG-BFT consensus enables parallel transaction processing with fast finality and keeps the network functioning even when up to a third of nodes are faulty. Similar models are used by projects Aptos<\/a>, Sui, IOTA and Hedera Hashgraph, but Fantom was the first to implement DAG-based smart-contract support.<\/p>\n

Each node maintains its own local DAG of event blocks containing transactions. Nodes do not forward blocks to each other to reach consensus, as in linear blockchains. Instead, validators periodically exchange transactions and events, synchronising them within a single epoch.<\/p>\n

The team cites the difficulty of further upgrading Fantom as the main reason for launching Sonic. If the stated throughput at the start was about 4,500 TPS<\/span>, later a more realistic ~2,000 TPS, Sonic promises up to 10,000 TPS. Transaction finality is under one second at a cost below $0.01. Such figures put it in contention with new L1s\u2014Monad and Berachain<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"A
Core characteristics of the Sonic network. Source: Sonic Labs<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The goal of Sonic Labs, which is responsible for Sonic\u2019s development, is to provide a platform for fast, cost-effective transactions with a tilt toward DeFi and gaming mechanics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Sonic developers envisaged liquidity unification with Ethereum. The native cross-chain bridge<\/a> Sonic Gateway<\/strong> allows ERC-20 tokens to be transferred between Sonic and the network of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gateway includes a failover mechanism that protects users\u2019 assets. If Gateway goes down, funds can be recovered on Ethereum after 14 days.<\/p>\n

\"A
Fallback redemption scheme for 1 ETH in case of failure. Source: Sonic Labs<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Asset movements take place at set intervals\u2014\u201cticks\u201d\u2014to use gas efficiently: every ten minutes from Ethereum to Sonic and every hour in the opposite direction. The Fast Lane function lets you accelerate a transaction by paying a higher fee.<\/p>\n

SonicVM<\/strong> is fully EVM-compatible and supports the Solidity and Vyper programming languages.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another important part of the upgrade is the Carmen<\/strong> solution. This system manages data according to the network\u2019s actual needs, cutting validator node storage requirements from 2,000 GB to 300 GB.<\/p>\n

Optimisation lowers operating costs for nodes, enabling more of them to participate in validation. Historical data that no longer require frequent access can be compressed or moved. Carmen also reduces archival-node storage from 11 TB to under 1 TB.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Staking, farming, airdrop<\/h2>\n

According to Andre Cronje<\/a>, once the missing DeFi mechanics are implemented in Sonic, the network will look \u201clike one big high-frequency trading platform\u201d. The following functions and incentives are planned:<\/p>\n