Sonic Labs says its Layer 1 blockchain will 'go public' soon after taking a snapshot for the S token airdrop

Sonic Labs, the Layer 1 blockchain project that is a split off the existing Fantom network, announced its new blockchain has produced its first block of transactions. Now that “Genesis” has been achieved, the network is expected to go “public soon,” the company said in an X post on Monday.

Earlier in the day, the team wrote that they were “Summoning the Sonic mainnet.”

The news comes a few days after Sonic Labs unveiled an upgraded, default “testnet 2.0” called Blaze for the EVM-compatible blockchain. According to a statement in late November, the Sonic testnet saw “incredible performance enhancements” including an average block time of 1.17 seconds and a finality time of 0.85 seconds for its first 221,000 blocks.

Sonic ultimately aims to achieve sub-second finality and set a new standard for high-performance chains with 10,000 transactions per second and one-second confirmation times.

The project is an outgrowth of Fantom’s Opera blockchain, which was launched in late 2019. It has raised $10 million from prominent investors including Stani Kulechov, Robert Leshner, Michael Egorov and Tarun Chitra and counts Andre Cronje as chief technology officer.

The team previously announced it expected to mainnet in late November or early December, meaning it is on track to maintain that timeline.

On Sunday, Sonic Labs said it had taken a “snapshot” for its airdrop allocation of tokens. After launch, tokens on the Sonic network will use the ticker $S and can be traded on a 1:1 basis with Fantom’s existing FTM tokens.

The new chain will feature a bridge to Ethereum called the Sonic Gateway, allowing the platform to leverage Ethereum’s liquidity and user base while maintaining its own high throughput and low transaction costs. It will also have a shared sequencer allowing it to simultaneously produce and secure blocks for multiple rollups.