Last week, Solana's second-layer network Sonic announced the completion of a $12 million Series A financing, and subsequently launched a testnet activity with 5 ecological games. Within 36 hours, more than 45,000 addresses participated, and the number of transactions exceeded 320,000. As the only SVM L2 supported by the Solana Foundation and Galaxy Digital, the largest dealer of Sol, Sonic occupies a unique ecological niche in the Solana ecosystem. This article will take you to understand this Solana L2 leader from the perspective of assets, technology and value.
TL;DR
※ Solana’s strong growth (from a low of $9 to a high of $200) gives us reason to believe that the leading coin in this round of gaming sector will appear in Solana, but an opportunity is needed to ignite consensus.
※ Sonic’s value lies in opening up the last mile of Solana game distribution, allowing the game traffic gold mine to realize its true potential on Solana. Just as the emergence of the meme distribution platform Pump.Fun ignited the Solana meme “crazy season” with frequent releases of great disks.
※ Sonic is bringing EVM's star games to Solana, along with its native users, applications, and asset liquidity. Through technical innovations in atomic interoperability and HyperGrid expansion framework, Sonic has made the compatibility and portability of Solana deployment no longer a constraint for game teams. Through the implementation of "one-click chain launch", Sonic will occupy a unique ecological niche: Solana's split plate.
What’s the value: Opening up the last mile of Solana game distribution
Compared with the EVM public chain, Solana is fast, cheap, and has good asset liquidity. However, such a good soil has not yet bred a matching game ecosystem. The reasons are nothing more than two aspects:
There is no consensus yet: Solana users are more accustomed to things that are light, highly liquid, and have low comprehension costs. In comparison, games, as products with heavy production and long release cycles, are difficult to settle on public chains with short attention curves.
Game construction cost: Multiple chains can improve the fault tolerance of games. To make games on Solana, it is necessary to develop and deploy SVM (Solana Virtual Machine) separately. However, as a project with heavy development costs and long development cycles, the construction cost of games is very high.
The game traffic gold mine is still an untapped area with huge potential in Solana.
So, where is the breakthrough point? Perhaps we can find the answer from the path of Pump.Fun, the Solana Meme distribution platform that has produced many amazing projects.
Users who have experienced Solana's dog season believe that they have felt the shock triggered by Pump.fun in the past quarter. This is the effect of infrastructure causing a thousand waves. Once upon a time, Solana only had a few Meme Coins that were popular, just like the current game ecosystem. Until Pump.fun appeared, it used the Bonding Curve and the mechanism of automatic migration to AMM to allow anyone to "send Memes with one click" at a cost of less than $2. This ran through the last mile of Meme Coin issuance, quickly ignited consensus in a short period of time, and pushed Solana into the "hurricane" period of the Meme season.
This is exactly the value Sonic is creating, completing the last mile of Solana game distribution.
Technological innovation: HyperGrid, the first expansion architecture, allows every narrative to be launched on the chain with one click
Solana and the crypto market are at an inflection point, with many potential narratives confined to small corners, limited by resources, costs, and infrastructure. Sonic’s technological innovation will enable thousands of games to enter the public eye through Solana.
What does “atomized interconnection” mean?
Sonic is the first SVM L2 to achieve atomic interoperability with the Solana mainnet, which means greatly reducing the cost of deploying games on Solana.
If an Arbitrum game wants to enter the Solana ecosystem, it no longer needs to rewrite a set of code for the incompatible SVM (Solana Virtual Machine). Its applications and account systems can execute transactions directly on Sonic. Not only can it enjoy the liquidity and base layer services provided by the Solana mainnet, but it can also experience ultra-fast and low-cost on-chain gaming experience through Sonic's execution layer. This is why Sonic has successfully brought several star games of EVM to Solana. For Solana, which currently lacks game asset targets, Sonic will serve as a gateway for games to enter Solana, and bring its native applications, users, and asset liquidity together.
HyperGrid expansion solution realizes "one-click chain launch"
HyperGrid is a scaling solution proposed by Sonic, which allows each narrative to be quickly deployed on Solana and uses narrative to help Solana scale. HyperGrid allows developers to seamlessly deploy new game engines and virtual machines in the Solana environment. It acts as a grid deployment toolkit to start a new SVM environment and create an independent space for each new game on the Solana network. Through native game components and extensible data types based on the ECS framework, developers can efficiently create complex game logic and data structures. In addition, HyperGrid, as a scaling architecture, avoids on-chain congestion, allowing more game logic and content to be executed on the chain.
Infrastructure customized for the entire life cycle of games
In addition, Sonic has also integrated infrastructure adapted to Solana game development and deployment, such as sandbox environments, customizable game development modules, and scalable data types, combined with the parallel execution of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) and the characteristics of the localized transaction fee market, to provide on-chain game players with faster transaction speeds, lower and more stable transaction fees, in order to achieve a faster and smoother on-chain gaming experience.
Explosive Start: Sonic is bringing EVM’s star game to Solana
Sonic is leading more game narratives to land on Solana. This includes attracting star games on the EVM public chain such as Arbitrum, Sui, and Ronin to join Solana, and promoting the integration and expansion of Solana's native game ecosystem. On June 19, Sonic launched a testnet incentive event with 5 games. Within 36 hours, more than 45,000 addresses participated and the number of transactions exceeded 320,000. According to the team, Sonic will release game nodes in the future, and some high-level nodes will be distributed as rewards to testnet activity participants.
With the formation of a three-way competition among ETH, BTC, and Solana, the public chain market will become more complicated in the foreseeable future. In addition to conventional perspectives such as value and technology, Sonic also occupies an important ecological niche: Sonic will become a split plate of the Solana ecosystem.
According to the "Ponzi Three-Disk Theory" proposed by Crypto Vedo, an ecosystem can be divided into three pillars: mutual aid, dividend, and split. The mutual aid is represented by MEME, which forms a mismatch of funds on a time scale through fair launch and full circulation; the dividend is represented by DeFi, where participants invest a whole sum of money at one time and receive linear dividends over time; and Sonic's "one-click chain launch" will fill the gap in Solana's split, and with Solana's strong growth, it will bring more low-priced new targets and incremental funds.
The above is just the beginning. The value of games, a traffic gold mine that is a must-have for strategists, has been fully reflected in the history of encryption. Starting with Sonic, we will see more diverse games appearing on Solana in the future, the consensus established by Solana users around game assets, and infrastructure products like Sonic that bring value to games and the Solana ecosystem.
