Written by: Little Cake

Sonic Labs CEO Matt Visser published the "Day 100" open letter on September 21, announcing that V2.2 would officially launch on September 22 (today). On the same day, a series of commercialization restructuring measures were disclosed: the company was split into two entities, chain operations and technology commercialization, four vertical business directions were identified, all non-validator token issuances were canceled, and an independent third-party audit of the supply of S tokens was commissioned.

The current price of S token is approximately $0.04, down about 97% from its historical high of $1 in February 2025. The market capitalization is about $160 million.

These actions seem intense, but before assessing them, we need to look at a number.

According to DefiLlama data, Sonic's full chain 24-hour fee revenue is about $75.

Seventy-five dollars. This is the fundamental question that V2.2 and the commercialization restructuring must answer: How to turn a chain with a daily revenue of $75 into a business entity with real revenue?

V2.2: What the Technology Upgrade Changed

There are four core changes in V2.2:

Bundled Transactions. Multiple transaction operations can be packaged as a single atomic operation. For developers, this means that complex DeFi strategies (such as flash loans + exchanges + deposits) can be completed in a single transaction, reducing gas consumption and failure risk.

Extended Transaction Sponsorship. The application layer and protocol layer can pay gas fees on behalf of users. Combined with Sonic's existing account abstraction support, V2.2 further lowers the on-chain entry threshold for new users, allowing them to use on-chain applications without holding S tokens.

Smart Contract Capacity Doubled. The code size limit for deployed contracts has increased from 24 KiB to 48 KiB, and the initial code limit has increased from 98 KiB to 196 KiB. This allows developers to deploy more complex contract logic.

New Execution Engine. Built-in MCP server and Priority Lanes (native transaction prioritization system). The MCP server allows AI Agents to directly connect to Sonic's on-chain environment, while Priority Lanes provide deterministic execution priority for transactions (such as autonomous operations by Agents) that need immediate execution even when the Fee Market is congested.

These upgrades are solid engineering deliverables, but they address the question of "Can the chain run more complex things" rather than "Is there anyone to run it."

Commercialization Restructuring: Four Directions, One Premise

In the open letter, Visser outlined four vertical business directions, each clearly marked with "Revenue is the ultimate indicator of whether to continue investing":

Payments and Foreign Exchange Channels. Collaborating with Frax to white-label frxUSD as USSD; connecting with Circle's native USDC; partnering with Spendl and Mastercard to provide fiat consumption features. Two regional BD leaders have already come on board. Visser believes this is the direction with the "most obvious performance differences and clearest commercialization path."

AI. Spawn was split into two products: Spawn Studio (a tool for developers to build and publish Agent templates) and Spawn Marketplace (a market for non-technical users to purchase and deploy Agents). The MCP server and Priority Lanes in V2.2 are the infrastructure layer for AI Agents to run on Sonic.

RWA and Tokenization. Nummo is one of the products: a cross-chain USD liquidity layer that allows yield-generating assets and RWA to lend and leverage as public debt assets using USSD. Visser stated that the scope of RWA has expanded from a single product to a broader tokenization direction.

Prediction Markets. Yes/No is a prediction market product built by an independent team, currently in closed testing on the Sonic Testnet. Sonic's role is as an infrastructure provider, not directly operating.

It is noteworthy that Visser also announced the abandonment of the perpetual contracts direction, which is a pragmatic judgment in the context of Hyperliquid's dominance in the chain derivatives market.

Change in Token Policy: No New Minting

Visser summarized the core change in token policy in two words: "Period."

All manual minting will be canceled. The only continued issuance is the automated distribution for paying validators, as this relates to network security, and currently, there are no alternatives.

This is a direct response to the long-standing pain points of the S token. The historical token issuance of Sonic (formerly Fantom) has been controversial, with ecological funds and incentive plan issuances diluting holders' value, while the ecological growth brought by these issuances has not been significant.

Visser's original words are worth quoting: "Buybacks, burns, and fee-sharing are easy to design and easy to announce. But without revenue to support them, they are just funds moving out of the treasury and disguising themselves as value accumulation. First make the product, generate revenue, and then direct that revenue to the token."

It acknowledges a truth that most L1 projects are reluctant to speak: No revenue-based token economics design, no matter how clever, is just transferring funds from the left pocket to the right pocket.

A Chain with $75 Daily Revenue Needs How Much to Be Self-Sustaining

Looking at the technical upgrades of V2.2 and the four business directions against the backdrop of $75 daily revenue, the gap becomes very clear.

The scale of stablecoins on the Sonic chain is about $142 million (of which USDC accounts for 99.28%), and the RWA assets are about $2.56 million. DeFi TVL is at the tens of millions of dollars level. These numbers are one to two orders of magnitude lower compared to Ethereum, Solana, and Arbitrum.

If S is to rise from the current $0.04 to even $0.10 (still down 90% from ATH), the market capitalization needs to increase from around $100 million to over $300 million. The annual protocol revenue required to support this market cap (based on a 30-50x FDV/Revenue multiple for DeFi L1) is at least $6 million to $10 million.

The current annualized revenue is $27,375 ($75×365), leaving a gap of 200 to 350 times.

This gap cannot be filled by on-chain transaction fees; in fact, the transaction sponsorship feature of V2.2 will reduce users' payment of gas. The real paths to fill this gap lie in the two directions mentioned by Visser: the revenue from the technical licensing of SonicVM and SonicDB (which does not rely on the crypto market cycle) and the application layer revenue generated by the payments/AI/RWA vertical businesses.