CMC News

#Sonic Labs Plans Vertical Integration To Boost $S Token

Sonic Labs announced plans to build and acquire core protocol applications to increase utility for its native $S token. The team behind the layer-1 blockchain, formerly known as Fantom, published a post on X Wednesday outlining its vertical integration strategy.

The Sonic Labs team said it will construct critical economic infrastructure where token utility, liquidity, and usage converge. The blockchain will remain open and permissionless for developers, but the team aims to prevent value leakage by owning and monetizing its most important economic activities.

Sonic is an EVM-compatible #layer-1 blockchain targeting hundreds of thousands of transactions per second with near-instant confirmations. Chainspect ranks it among the highest-throughput chains in the EVM ecosystem.

The team's previous value accrual model relied on the idea that more users generate more transactions, leading to higher gas spending, deflation, and value return to the #token. Sonic Labs stated this "gas fee only" model has been disproven over the past five years.

Blockspace is no longer scarce as scaling technology advances, the team noted. Rollups, alternative L1s, modular architectures, and high-throughput designs have created a structural surplus. This results in fee compression and capital moving freely between ecosystems, they added.

Sonic Labs said its vertically integrated ecosystem will control key infrastructure, including flagship primitives and core products across #trading, credit, payments, settlement, and risk markets. The team plans to either build these systems or acquire and integrate high-quality application teams from across the industry.