Fantom Launches Testnets For Sonic Upgrade, Estimates 6,700% Throughput Gain

Fantom launched testnets for its upcoming revamped tech stack, Sonic, on Oct. 24, with the team claiming Sonic’s throughput will compete with major credit card companies and banks.

In a blog post, Fantom Foundation estimated Sonic can support up to 2,048 transactions per second (TPS) and an average finality of around 1.1 seconds. The upgrade also targets a 90% reduction in database storage and a lowered collateral requirements of 50,000 FTM for stakers, in addition to launching a new virtual machine.

“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,” Fantom said. “The upgrade is the latest step in Fantom’s mission to improve its underlying platform without resorting to sharding or additional layers.”

The upgraded Fantom Virtual machine remains fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and its programming languages. Fantom is targeting a mainnet deployment for Sonic during Q2 2024.

The news comes amid a brutal downtrend for Fantom, with the network shedding 99.4% of its total value locked (TVL) since ranking as the third-largest Layer 1 with an all-time high of $7.9B in early March 2022, according to DeFi Llama.

Just $47M worth of assets are locked in Fantom-based DeFi protocols today, up from an 18-month low of $39.2M last week.

Two testnets

Fantom deployed both a public and a closed testnet for Sonic.

The closed testnet is intended to showcase Sonic’s maximum capabilities, while the public testnet is open for any user to explore.

Fantom said it is feeding the closed testnet with more than 2,000 TPS or 175M synthetic transactions daily to simulate its peak performance. This compares to a throughput limit of 30 TPS for the existing Fantom mainnet.

Fantom also estimated Sonic validators require 351 GB to store 518M pruned transactions, a 29% reduction compared to 1,194 GB on the Fantom mainnet. “The reduction in operational costs… decreases the barrier to entry to operate a cost-effective validator and makes it more accessible to participate in securing the network,” Fantom said.

Roughly Two-thirds of the transactions are ERC-20 transfers or mints, a quarter are Uniswap swaps, and 10% are native token transfers. The closed testnet will reset every fortnight.

The public testnet is also being fed synthetic transactions, but at a reduced rate of 130 TPS to leave room for transactions executed by public users.