The Fantom Foundation has announced the launch of testnets for its upcoming revamped tech stack, Sonic, on the 24th of October.
The team at Fantom has stated it estimates around 6700% throughput gain, claiming Sonic’s throughput would compete with major banks and credit card companies.
Fantom Announces Testnets
The Fantom Foundation announced the news in a blog post, in which it estimated that Sonic would be able to support 2048 transactions per second (TPS). It would also have an average finality of 1.1 seconds. The Sonic upgrade also aims to achieve a 90% reduction in database storage, along with lowered collateral requirements of 50,000 FTM tokens for stakers. Additionally, the upgrade will launch a new virtual machine.
“We are thrilled to announce Fantom Sonic, the latest breakthrough upgrade to Fantom that will scale the network to new heights. With a brand-new virtual machine, improved database storage, and optimized consensus, Sonic is anticipated to achieve 2,000+ transactions per second (TPS) at an average finality of one second while consuming a fraction of the storage used by its predecessor, Opera. The upgrade is the latest step in Fantom’s mission to improve its underlying platform without resorting to sharding or additional layers.”
The blog post further added,
“Sonic puts Fantom’s transactional capabilities on par with the heavy throughput of institutional players like major credit card companies, international banks, and enterprise institutions.”
The upgraded Fantom Virtual Machine remains fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and its associated programming languages. Fantom plans to deploy the Sonic mainnet sometime during Q2 2024.
Separate Testnets
Fantom announced that it is deploying two testnets for Sonic: a public testnet and a closed testnet. The closed testnet will showcase Sonic’s maximum capabilities, while the public testnet is open for any user to test and explore.
“The Fantom Sonic testnet environment consists of two separate testnets to demonstrate the upgrade before its mainnet release. The closed testnet aims to showcase the maximum theoretical limits of Sonic, whereas the open testnet is interactive, allowing any user to experience Sonic directly.”
Fantom added that it is feeding the closed testnet with over 2000 transactions per second (TPS) or 175M synthetic transactions daily. This was being done to simulate its peak performance. This is compared to a throughput limit of 30 transactions per second on the existing Fantom mainnet. It also estimated that Sonic validators would require around 351 GB to store 518M pruned transactions. This represents a 29% reduction compared to the 1,194 GB required on the Fantom mainnet.
“With this setup, the closed testnet achieves above 2,000 TPS with a finality of around 1.1 seconds and over 400 million gas per second. This is far beyond the achievable performance of the current Fantom mainnet, which sits at around 30 TPS. There will be a significant reduction in disk space requirements for validators and archive nodes. Currently, for approximately 518 million transactions, an offline pruned validator requires 1,194 GB (i.e., offline pruning removes historical states by stopping the validator), whereas Sonic with online pruning requires 351 GB only.”
According to Fantom, this reduction in operational costs would significantly reduce the barrier to entry and operate a cost-effective validator, making it more accessible to participate in securing the network. Currently, around two-thirds of the transactions are ERC-20 transfers or mints. A quarter are Uniswap swaps, while 10% are native token transfers. Meanwhile, the public testnet is being fed synthetic transactions. However, these are at a reduced rate of 130 transactions per second (TPS). This is done to leave room for transactions executed by public users.
Fantom Downturn
The news about Sonic comes in the middle of a brutal downturn for Fantom. The network has shed over 99% of its total value locked (TVL) since it ranked as the third-largest Layer-1, reaching an all-time high of $7.9 billion in 2022, according to data from DeFiLlama. Only $47 million worth of assets are currently locked in Fantom-based DeFi protocols. This is up from an 18-month low of $39.2 million, which it hit last week.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
