Day 100 - Where We Are, And Where We're Headed.

Handover is done. It took much longer than we wanted, as I said last time, but all the important pieces are finished, and the business has clear lines of accountability for the first time since I got here. We've still got some housekeeping ahead for community channels and some straggling account handovers, and although they are a priority, none of those are blockers in our ability to get real things done.

The reorg comes next. We're putting heads of department in place and I'll name them once they're confirmed, because announcing people I might have to revise in six weeks helps nobody. The chain remains Sonic and continues to operate as the L1. Alongside it, a separate technology business will focus on building and commercialising the products and services that sit around it.

Sonic V2.2

V2.2 goes LIVE on Tuesday, September 22, 2026.

V2.2 introduces bundled transactions, expanded transaction sponsorship, larger smart contract limits, and a new execution engine designed to support the network's next stage of growth.

Fast was the floor, and V2.2 is what we're building on top of it.

The Core, and The 4 Verticals

Before the four verticals, there is the core business: building the best L1 we can, growing the financial activity that happens on it, and commercialising the technology underneath it.

That means DeFi still matters. We still want deep liquidity, strong lending markets and useful financial products on Sonic. What changes is how we think about our role. Integrations are valuable, but an integration by itself is not a business strategy. Our job is to build the infrastructure, distribution and products that make developers, users and capital want to be here in the first place.

The same applies to adoption more broadly. More applications, more assets and more activity on Sonic should translate into more network usage and more economic activity flowing through the chain. The case for Sonic should come from people actually using what we build, not from us asking the market to value promises before the revenue and usage exist.

There is also a business underneath the chain itself. SonicVM (Virtual Machine) and SonicDB (Database Storage Engine) are both commercially licensable, and we have had serious conversations about licensing them to counterparties who have no particular interest in Sonic as a chain and every interest in the cost line these products address. That is revenue which does not depend on crypto adoption cycles, does not require winning a liquidity war and does not need a token narrative to work. It is software that solves an expensive problem, sold to people who have that problem. If that describes your stack, or you know a team it describes, please reach out to build@soniclabs.com.

The areas below are commercial initiatives of the separate technology business, with Sonic providing the underlying infrastructure where relevant.

On top of that sit four areas where we think Sonic has a specific commercial advantage: Payments and FX rails, AI, RWAs and tokenisation, and Prediction Markets. Each has its own goals, and revenue is ultimately the number that decides whether we keep investing in it.

Payments and FX rails. This is where the performance difference is clearest and the commercial case is easiest to make. The opportunity is cross-border transfers at a fraction of the current cost and settlement time, supported by the partners and regulatory groundwork needed to make that real rather than theoretical. We work with Frax, whose frxUSD we white-label as USSD, and with Circle for native USDC onchain. We are also working with Spendl for on-ramping and Mastercard spending functionality. We have two regional hires pointed squarely at this vertical.

AI. The network and client upgrade under internal test includes a built-in MCP server and Priority Lanes, our native transaction prioritisation system. Spawn has also become two products. Spawn Studio is where protocols submit for inclusion in the Sonic MCP server and developers build privately or publish agentic templates. Spawn Marketplace is where non-technical users find the template they need, confirm the agent's mission, fund it and send it on its way. An agent operating autonomously needs execution when it needs it rather than when the fee market permits, and settlement that is final at the moment of action. That combination is the reason an agent product belongs on a chain at all.

RWAs and Tokenisation. This remains a focus. Nummo is one initiative within it: a USD liquidity layer for yield-bearing assets across chains. It connects yield-bearing tokens and RWAs from different ecosystems to USSD as a common debt asset, allowing users to retain their underlying yield exposure while accessing borrowing, cross-chain trading and leveraged strategies. Sonic coordinates and settles the activity underneath, through the Sodax SDK.

Our ambition is broader than one product. We want Sonic to be useful infrastructure for the issuance, movement and financial use of tokenised assets, with our role increasingly focused on the rails underneath rather than trying to own every product built on top.

Prediction Markets. Sonic's business here is infrastructure, licensed to platforms that operate these markets, not operating them ourselves. Yes/No is a standalone product built by a separate team outside Sonic's core organisation, currently in closed beta on Sonic Testnet. Sonic's role is the same as it is for any project building on us. Yes/No will be opened up for wider stress testing shortly and signup details will be made available when it is.

One change since the last letter. Perps is no longer something we are pursuing alone, and the RWA work has been widened into tokenisation more broadly, which is where the demand actually is. 

Culture, Not Memecoins

This one is harder and we haven't fully solved it, so I'd rather tell you where we've landed so far than pretend otherwise.

My view on memecoins hasn't changed. Most of it runs on attention with nothing durable underneath, and Sonic isn't going to endorse tokens, provide liquidity for them or pick favourites among them, because that isn't what an L1 is for and it ends badly every single time somebody tries it.

There's a real distinction, though, between that and what people are actually doing on chains right now. Communities are minting things that carry genuine cultural weight and creators are finding their audiences through them. Culture coins, in other words, rather than memecoins, and the difference between the two is whether there's anything underneath the token or just the token.

So here's the commitment. We've already started speaking with builders in this space, and the next step is to bring them together for a focused conversation about what meaningful support from Sonic should actually look like.

Our starting point is infrastructure, tooling, documentation and neutrality, not liquidity, endorsements or a Sonic-blessed launchpad picking winners. We also do not want the relationship to become Sonic being asked to shill individual tokens to retail.

If you're building in this space and have a view on where that line should sit, tell us. This is something we should be defining with the people building it, not announcing at them.

On S

No new mints. Period.

Every manual mint is being cancelled. The only one that continues is the automated emissions mint that pays validators, because that one secures the network and killing it isn't possible without an alternative solution which we don't have yet, but everything else stops. We're working on this and its a personal mission of mine. 

We are finalizing some new independent validator operators and also relooking at how the rewards can be more dynamic. We'll have some more updates here soon.

My position from Day 50 stands. Buybacks, burns and fee sharing are easy to design and even easier to announce, but without revenue behind them, they're transfers out of the treasury dressed up as value accrual. Ship products, generate revenue, then route it. What's changed since last time is that the ability to expand supply is being removed rather than just promised against. 

We have also commissioned an independent third-party audit of the S token supply and related reporting. That work is underway now, with the final report expected within the next few weeks. When it is complete, we will publish the findings and openly discuss what needs to be done going forward.

Where To Find Us

Over the next few weeks, we'll be at Korea Blockchain Week and in Singapore for Token2049, partnering with Hack Seasons across both events and with Cicada in Singapore.

I'll personally be in Korea and Singapore, attending a number of side events and meeting with teams across the ecosystem. If you want to connect while I'm there, email me.

KBW
HSC Seoul - Thursday, October 1

Token2049
Open Board - Tuesday, October 6
HSC Singapore - Thursday, October 8 

If you're at any of them, come and find us. The conversations that turn all of the above into revenue happen in rooms, not in letters.

New Team Members Joining

As Sonic moves further into payments, tokenised assets and other regulated areas, we're adding senior operators across finance, compliance and regional business development. The goal is simple: put experienced people in the markets and functions where execution matters most.

Finance and Compliance. Brandon Topham will join Sonic to lead Finance and Compliance. Brandon spent three years as Divisional Executive for Investigations and Enforcement at South Africa's Financial Sector Conduct Authority, where he was responsible for enforcing financial sector law across the country, and went on to engage with various auditing and advisory positions globally. He's a Chartered Accountant, an admitted advocate of the High Court of South Africa, a solicitor on the non-practicing roll of England and Wales, a Certified Fraud Examiner and a Chartered Director, as well as having served in the South African Parliament on the Trade and Industry, Finance, Auditor General and Appropriations committees.

This matters more than the usual senior hire announcement and I want to be plain about why. Everything described above takes us further into regulated territory, and every serious counterparty in payments, brokerage and tokenised assets wants to know who owns compliance before they'll talk about anything else. That's a question most of this industry answers badly and we need to be better.

APAC. Melvin Tan will join Sonic to lead business development across the region. He currently leads portfolio growth and BD at Signum Capital, supporting Web3 founders across fundraising, growth and partnerships, with earlier experience in crypto incubation at Tenity, founding a consumer app and eight years trading institutional equities. At Sonic, his focus will be on building relationships with founders, institutions and real-world partners across Asia, connecting them to the capital, opportunities and infrastructure needed to grow the ecosystem.

Africa. Charles Elliman will join Sonic as Growth Consultant, bringing more than 18 years of experience across payments, fintech and merchant growth in South Africa and across the continent. His background spans commercial expansion, team building and the development of merchant and financial partnerships, with a strong focus on translating strategy into revenue. At Sonic, his focus will be on building retail, merchant and distribution relationships across banking, fintech and financial services to strengthen our presence across Africa.

We are not adding these roles to fill an org chart or put pins on a map. We are adding them because the work ahead requires stronger compliance, deeper regional relationships and people on the ground who can turn opportunity into partnerships, distribution and revenue.

Closing

A big thank you to our technical teams, who've carried a lot through a stretch that's been harder on the inside than it has looked from outside. Another big thank you to everyone who has stayed, argued with us and kept building here. We appreciate it all and know there are still many more of you waiting for us to prove ourselves which I'm looking forward to doing.

These letters are quarterly and they'll grow in detail as there's more to report. Have a read and tell us what you think we've got right or wrong, because feedback@soniclabs.com comes straight to the team and we'd much rather hear it than not.

Cheers for now. Onwards and upwards.

- Matt Visser, CEO