AC's comeback announcement claims to surpass "Parallel EVM." What exactly is Fantom Sonic?

Forwarded Title:AC comes back to advertise, claiming to surpass “parallel EVM”, what exactly is Fantom Sonic?

Fantom seems to be rising against the odds.

Amidst the recent significant pullback in the overall cryptocurrency market over the past week, the price of FTM has been spiraling upwards, breaking new highs seen in nearly a year.

A key figure in the Fantom community, the star of the previous DeFi Summer, AC (Andre Cronje), has re-emerged, frequently posting trades on Twitter and even creating a new “MEME” language:

The protagonist of the meme is Fantom Sonic, implying its superior performance with a sense of boxing and kicking “parallel EVM”, suggesting its superiority.

AC bluntly stated:

“In terms of the benefits brought by our technological improvements, parallelism is not even in the top 3.”

On one hand, narratives of high-performance new L1s such as Monad and Sei with “parallel EVM” are gaining market traction, while on the other hand, older L1s like Solana and Avalanche are experiencing a strong rebound.

In the L1 war, Fantom appears to be a hidden gem in the vast sea, not in the spotlight, but also not completely detached from the competition.

With the upcoming launch of the Fantom Sonic mainnet in the spring, could this be a key catalyst for FTM to enter a frenzy mode?

Faster than parallel EVM?

What is Fantom Sonic?

In short, Fantom Sonic is the next generation of the Fantom network, replacing the previous Fantom Opera and can be understood as Fantom 2.0. Fantom Sonic includes new clients, validators, a virtual machine (FVM), the Carmen database, and optimized Lachesis consensus mechanisms, which will significantly improve the execution efficiency of the original Fantom.

Existing smart contracts on Fantom Opera are fully compatible with Fantom Sonic because FVM is fully compatible with EVM and its programming languages (Solidity, Vyper).

In fact, Fantom Sonic didn’t just pop out recently.

As early as the end of October last year, the Fantom Foundation announced the launch of the Sonic testnet.

According to its plan, the mainnet will be officially released this spring, and now, nearing the end of March, market speculation has naturally increased. Regardless of the narrative surrounding L1, the core message is clear — our performance is better. From the current publicly available testnet data and materials of Fantom Sonic, its selling point is also very obvious, focusing on faster speed and stronger performance than all existing EVMs.

AC’s publicly shared data on social media states：

Based on current EVM, the theoretical limit is approximately 200 transactions per second, which can be increased by about 40 transactions per second by adding “optimistic parallelism”, reaching a maximum of approximately 240 transactions per second.

However, if based on the new FVM, the theoretical limit is approximately 30,000 transactions per second, and even with additional parallelization technology, the maximum can only be increased to 4,500 transactions per second.

The implication is that Fantom Sonic’s performance foundation is already strong enough, and the additional parallelization doesn’t offer significant improvement potential.

To achieve performance enhancements without relying on parallelization, Fantom Sonic focuses on its own path of improvement. This is achieved by optimizing key areas:

• FVM: While maintaining compatibility with EVM, FVM provides an environment for executing smart contracts faster than the traditional EVM, thus enhancing execution efficiency.
• Storage Environment: Introducing the Carmen database storage solution, akin to installing an intelligent indexing system in the archive room. This significantly improves data access efficiency, reducing storage space requirements by 90%. Providers running RPC services can achieve a 95% cost reduction through multiple archive nodes, increasing cost efficiency by 20 times.

• Consensus Algorithm: Initially, Fantom adopted the Lachesis consensus mechanism, a leaderless asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) consensus mechanism, which inherently had good consensus efficiency. With the Sonic update, the Lachesis algorithm underwent further optimization, reducing information redundancy in the network and improving decision-making efficiency. This not only accelerates the transaction confirmation process but also enhances the overall throughput of the network.

In an environment where narrative significance and attention often outweigh technical intricacies, the core of Fantom Sonic can be simplified as “faster and stronger.” Some publicly available data also confirms this significant performance improvement.

In the current design of Sonic, the testnet is divided into two types. One is a closed testnet, used to demonstrate the performance limits that Sonic can reach in an ideal environment. The other is an open testnet, which allows for simulating the performance results of actual applications in an environment connected and interacted with the outside world.

From late October last year to January this year, the Fantom team conducted multiple rounds of testing on the closed testnet of Sonic. These tests aimed to simulate real user influx scenarios, assessing Sonic’s performance under various conditions such as traffic pressure, transaction confirmation, TPS (transactions per second), token exchanges, and transfers.

The results indicate that under simulated real traffic conditions, Sonic can support a comprehensive TPS of 2000, with final consistency achieved in about 1 second (meaning transactions submitted are confirmed as valid and won’t be changed, taking approximately 1 second).

While these are theoretical data from closed tests, for comparison, Ethereum’s final consistency typically takes around 1.5-3 minutes, while Solana can achieve seconds-level finality but with fewer TPS compared to Sonic’s test data.

Furthermore, if Sonic were only handling swap transactions, its theoretical data suggests it could support 4000 TPS with final consistency achieved in around 1.3 seconds. If only processing transfers, the situation becomes even more impressive, with 10000 TPS and final consistency in 1.6 seconds.

Pure test data may not have significant reference value; it’s more like Fantom Sonic flexing its muscles, while the actual user experience is more convincing.

On another public testnet of Sonic, we can see a full-chain game similar to a maze, where you need to control a green dot to navigate out of the game board to win. Each move requires an on-chain interaction, and in my experience, each step indeed prompts the wallet to be opened for signing.

It’s worth mentioning that from receiving test coins to continuously moving and interacting, the perceived confirmation time for each step is only about 1-2 seconds. If the mainnet can achieve such rapid experience, it will have great potential for supporting full-chain games or more high-frequency interactive DApps.

Sonic Labs has been established, with AC personally guiding ecosystem projects.

No matter how fast Sonic is, the key lies in having ecosystem projects running on top of it. To complement the improvements in technology and performance, in late December last year, the Fantom Foundation established an incubator named Sonic Labs to assist developers in building innovative dApps and preparing for the Sonic mainnet.

The top 5 winners of the application development will also have the opportunity to share 1,000,000 FTM tokens and receive personal guidance from Andre Cronje. Additionally, winners will receive guidance from Pyth, Request Finance, and the Fantom Foundation on technology, compliance, salaries, and company structure, and they will have the opportunity to raise funds from VC partners.

It can be said that the official support for ecosystem projects is significant, with resources being invested directly by the Fantom Foundation.

In February of this year, the Fantom official also announced the 5 winners of the aforementioned activity. Naturally, these winners have become new ecosystem projects worth paying attention to after the launch of Sonic:

• Lynx Protocol

A perpetual contracts trading DEX that can use any token as collateral and offers 100X leverage

Twitter:@Lynx_Protocol

Official website:lynx.finance

• Thunder Dome

The SocialFi project allows users to interact with the community through tickets (tradable social tokens).

Twitter: @ThunderDomeSoFi

Official website:thunderdome.so

• Debts

A P2P lending platform that allows users to choose the required collateral, interest rates, etc. when seeking to borrow assets.

Twitter:@DebitaFinance

Official website:debita.fi

• KiricCoin

Green tech startup that tracks and rewards individuals for their sustainable behavior to help combat climate change.

Twitter:@KiriCoin

Official website:kiritechnologies.com

• Froqorion

A team-based role-playing game set in the ancient frog civilization Froqorion.

Twitter: @Froqorion

Official website:http://froqorion.com

Do not pay for “speed,” pay for “making things happen.”

Fantom Sonic’s current demonstration of speed and strong performance is indeed one reason why the market prices in FTM. However, speculative narratives are always the dominant theme. The L1 race has long passed the stage of only focusing on TPS (transactions per second) stories. Simply having strong performance is not enough to stand firm in the fierce competition for attention, especially considering that Fantom itself is not a new project like Monad.

Some ecosystem projects associated with Fantom have subtly mocked L2 for being complacent about their low gas fees for trading, pointing out that Fantom’s gas fees have been consistently low for the past 4 years. This underscores a key issue: if the market only values Fantom for its good performance, why hasn’t it always enjoyed the spotlight in the crypto stage?

Clearly, technology is just the foundation of the narrative; whether the market buys into it and whether there will be “things happening” are also crucial. In this regard, AC, the soul figure of Fantom, has always been known for making things happen. While Fantom Sonic’s performance is indeed impressive, the market’s valuation of FTM must also consider the anticipation for AC and his team to stir things up next. Whether he can support ecosystem projects to explore more possibilities and play a greater role in operations and communication are additional expectations for Fantom Sonic.

It’s not just about buying into performance; buying into making things happen is the unspoken consensus in the attention economy of the crypto market. As for whether FTM will maintain its breakthrough against the headwinds and whether Fantom Sonic will become the new winner in the L1 war, only time will tell.

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