Michael has a background in Finance and Information Technology from the University of Sydney, where he also published research on smart contract security. He worked as the first full-time engineer for Block8, a blockchain development company in Sydney, before going on to establish one of Australia’s first digital asset funds, now known as Trovio Group.
From zero to over $1 billion in total value locked within six months, how would you describe Sonic’s journey so far?
We were fortunate to be able to onboard the extensive user base and developer community that Fantom had built over the years, so Sonic didn’t have to start from scratch.
That said, there are never any certainties when launching a new network. There’s definitely a sense of relief seeing our concept for a massively scalable EVM layer 1 validated by the hundreds of millions of dollars in liquidity that’s flowed in, ultimately pushing Sonic past the $1 billion mark in May.
TVL is still a fairly crude metric for gauging network health, but at the end of the day, higher is better.
Deep liquidity underpins everything that happens onchain. It doesn’t matter how fast your network runs if there’s no liquidity to power it.
What have been some of the biggest challenges with scaling this quickly, and what lessons from Fantom carried over to Sonic?
Blockchain has evolved a lot since Fantom launched. While network activity there was still ticking over nicely, there were things we simply couldn’t retrofit.
Starting a new chain let us fully utilise the technology that Professor Bernhard Scholz and his team had been developing since 2022.
It was definitely a challenge to rigorously test this technology, but the team spent a lot of time doing exactly that. The end result was a smooth launch.
We saw with Opera in 2021 what happens when a network isn’t scalable, when there’s heavy usage, transaction fees, and confirmation times spike. Fortunately, those problems are largely a thing of the past.
Another big challenge was getting the right third-party infrastructure in place. The business development team did a lot of work securing commitments from these providers.
Thanks to that, we launched with features that Fantom didn’t have, like Gnosis Safe, native USDC, and Chainlink CCIP, to name a few.
We also put a lot of effort into grants, marketing, and several airdrop campaigns to grow adoption quickly, and that’s worked well so far.
Is there another trend, metric, or turning point that gives you conviction in Sonic’s long-term vision right now?
There are plenty of metrics you can track for network growth, but I think one of the most interesting for Sonic is application fees.
Builders on Sonic earn 90% of the fees generated by their apps through Fee Monetisation, so it’s a really useful way to track both the number of applications and how much onchain activity they’re driving.
It also creates a strong incentive loop for developers to build on Sonic, and a useful benchmark for whether the ecosystem is moving in the right direction.
Fee Monetisation has already seen rapid growth, with over 1.6 million S tokens, more than half a million dollars, collected in just over six months.
With account abstraction features via EIP-7702 coming in your next upgrade, how do you see this changing the Sonic experience for users?
Account abstraction massively improves the user experience, especially for new users. It lets people submit transactions onchain without having to manually sign them, by delegating that authority to a third party, for example, a developer’s smart contract.
This enables features like batch transactions, sponsored gas fees, and social recovery.
With native USDC replacing bridged USDC, how are you tracking the impact on liquidity and DeFi composability?
It’s a simple metric to track onchain, and it’s happening naturally. Developers and users are gravitating towards native USDC, helped by the fact that so many major centralised exchanges have already integrated it.
Deprecating bridged USDC is a big deal. While both versions maintain dollar parity, native USDC is better in every way. It increases network safety, improves liquidity, enables seamless cross-chain USDC transfers, and provides institutional-grade on- and off-ramps.
It’s already been widely adopted on Sonic. Once native USDC achieves full ecosystem-wide dominance, it’ll make life much simpler for developers. They’ll be able to build applications that are safer and more efficient, without having to rely on wrapped or bridged tokens.
What moments or takeaways from the Sonic Summit in Vienna best captured the energy and direction of Sonic and its ecosystem and what can we expect from Sonic Summit Singapore?
Vienna was a real blast. It’s an amazing city, and while the Sonic community would’ve shown up no matter where we held it, Vienna just felt right. It’s steeped in history but still feels modern and forward-thinking — you could say the same about Sonic.
The venue itself, the MAK Museum of Applied Arts, made for a really unique setting for a blockchain conference.
If I had to pick one highlight, it would be the hackathon. It never ceases to amaze me how solo developers and small teams come up with such creative solutions to complex problems.
Our next Sonic Summit will be in Singapore on 29–30 September 2025 at the Pan Pacific on Orchard Road, just before Token2049. It’ll be a two-day conference with a strong focus on the Asian market, where Sonic is growing rapidly.