Recently, Binance announced that it will integrate Sonic Chain into Binance Wallet, and will provide airdrop rewards to users who trade Sonic ecological tokens launched on Binance Alpha on Binance App or Binance Wallet. Despite the constant fluctuations in the Monkey Market, Sonic seems to continue to develop steadily in this fluctuation. As early as March, only 4 months after its launch, the TVL of Sonic Chain has exceeded the $2 billion mark, and its token $S has a good support level near the market value of $1.5 billion.
With the gradually enriched ecosystem and the strong support from Binance, can Sonic bring the concept of DeFi back to the top in the current Crypto that has lost its new narrative direction? This article will introduce Sonics second quarter points model, Sonics Binance Alpha, and some interesting new projects of Sonic.
Season 2 is coming - new points mode
Three months ago, I wrote a guide for earning points in Season 1, which mentioned the profit strategies of mainstream platforms including Silo Finance and Ring. At that time, the rich DeFi ecosystem had increased their TVL nearly 5 times in one month. Three months later, Sonics TVL increased nearly 3 times again, from $800 million to $2.2 billion, and the net inflow of the entire chain ranked first in the past three months.
Further reading: TVL increased fivefold in one month, sorting out the most profitable revenue strategies on Sonic
Sonic held the Sonic Summit at the MAK Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts from May 6 to May 8. The high-standard artistic atmosphere was praised by participants. It was at the meeting that the Sonic project team also announced the scoring rules for the second season, which were more standardized and visual than the previous season.
The number of Gems each app can obtain in Season 2 depends on its final score App Final Score, which is obtained by multiplying three core indicators.
App Gem Score (A): This score is calculated based on the applications category weight Category Weight, whether it is Sonic native Sonic Native Weight and incentive weight Incentive Weight, reflecting the platforms strategic inclination towards different categories of apps.
Point Score (B): represents the total of all activity points generated by the App for users, measuring user activity.
Revenue Score (C): The cumulative revenue generated by the App, reflecting its business capabilities.
Finally, the total score of the App is calculated as: A × B × C. Based on this final score, the platform will distribute the total Gems reward pool to each App in proportion. The specific formula is: Gems of a certain App = Total score of the App ÷ Total score of all Apps × Total number of Gems in Season 2.
The current top 10 App Gem projects are almost all Sonic native projects, except for old DeFi such as Aave and Pendle.
Compared to the Gems rule algorithm of the first season, the second season is more complete, mainly because it adds the C Revenue Score.
A reflects that Sonic wants to encourage project owners to output more types of native projects. Although the specific types of details have not yet been announced, judging from the distribution ratio of project types in Sonics first season, the most dominant one is the cross-chain bridge, followed by DEX transaction-related functions.
B is to incentivize project parties to bring more value to users, which is more similar to the store points of Dianping.com. Stores provide users with better services or added value (bringing more points or rewards), and users give better feedback to the public or the ecosystem (the project party gets a higher Point Score), thus forming a mutually beneficial balance between users and project parties.
The C hopes to encourage the production of more Killer APPs, which are commonly known as useful applications.
The updated Gems rules more comprehensively incentivize the stickiness of users and the ecosystem, but at the same time they also improve the various qualities that project parties need to possess, which may force the existing team to upgrade or more excellent teams to join.
Sonic Summit Jailbreak
During the Sonic Summit, Sonic also held an interesting mini-game. Users who cannot program can participate by tricking AI. Participants need to design clever prompts to induce the system guarded by Google Gemini AI to leak a set of private keys. Each time a prompt is submitted, a certain amount of S tokens must be paid, and the fee gradually increases and is included in the bonus pool. Users who successfully extract private keys and pass verification will win the bonus pool.
Developers who can program can use the vulnerabilities of smart contracts to solve problems. Developers need to identify and exploit the smart contract vulnerabilities deliberately embedded by the Cantina team to obtain funds from the bonus pool. Developers who successfully exploit the vulnerabilities and pass the verification will win the bonus pool.
The current winner is user Users who used the clue words to successfully break through the defense of the AI guard and found the private key, and received a prize of approximately US$30,000.
Gold Sponsor
The sponsors of this event were divided into several levels of gold, silver and bronze according to the depth of their sponsorship, and the three sponsors who invested the most were all well-known.
Galaxy was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in New York City with offices in North America, Europe and Asia. It provides services including trading, lending, strategic consulting services, institutional-grade investment solutions, proprietary Bitcoin mining and custody services, network validator services, and enterprise custody technology development. It is said that the assets on its platform have reached $10 billion in the 2024 financial report. They recently announced that they plan to list on the Nasdaq on May 16.
SwapX is a multifunctional DEX on Sonic, integrating Algebras Integral V4 platform (similar to Uniswap V4s HOOK), centralized liquidity mechanism, automated liquidity management and plug-in architecture. The combination of these technologies brings a low-slippage and high-depth trading experience.
Compared with traditional AMM, SwapX supports LP to accurately set the liquidity range, and the ve(3, 3) model introduced by SwapX further deeply binds the incentive mechanism with governance. By adopting the EIP-4337 account abstraction standard to allow users to log in via email or Google, as an all-in-one Sonic Dex, the layout should allow both Web2 users to enter Crypto and Web3 Native users to have a certain degree of playability.
ICHI is a non-custodial DeFi protocol that simplifies and optimizes liquidity management for token projects, DAOs, asset managers, and blockchain ecosystems. By supporting the deposit of single tokens into centralized liquidity pools, ICHI automates the liquidity configuration process between AMMs. ICHIs automated vault aims to support token issuance, maintain price stability, and continuously increase liquidity depth while reducing the risk of impermanent loss for liquidity providers.
SwapX and ICHI are also deep partners. Not only are they the gold sponsors of the Sonic Summit, they also cooperated with the food truck outside the venue to provide lunch for the participants. Of the $71 million in ICHI TVL, $46 million belongs to SwapX. The deep cooperation between the two parties may bring more ecological extensions to Sonic in the future.
Binance Alpha collaboration adds fuel to the fire
On May 1, Binance announced that Binance Wallet integrated support for the Sonic mainnet. After the announcement, the TVL of various protocols on Sonic increased to varying degrees. According to Nansen data, the number of active addresses on Sonic increased by 289% in 7 days, and the transaction fees of the chain also increased by 72%.
On May 8, Binance officially announced the total reward of about 2.2 million US dollars for the Sonic Chain Trading Competition . The event will run from May 8 to May 23. Based on the users transactions on the Alpha Sonic Chain, the top 13,000 SHADOW token users with $SHADOW trading volume will be allocated 22,100 SHADOW tokens on average. The top 1,200 BEETS token users with $BEETS trading volume will be allocated 1,824,000 BEETS tokens on average. The top 10,000 ANON token users with $ANON trading volume will be allocated 153,000 ANON tokens on average. The top 7,000 users with Sonic Chain comprehensive trading volume will be allocated 1,001,000 S tokens on average.
However, at the beginning of the event, many community users reported that the wear and tear of Biance Alpha transactions was too large, and some even reported wear and tear exceeding $50. This may be one of the reasons why Binance officials specially rewarded double weight for limit orders in this event.
Further reading: Binance Alpha Gold Mining Guide: How to Score Highly and Efficiently with Low Cost
In addition to using Binance to earn points, what other projects can Sonic pay attention to?
DeFi
SilverSwap is the DEX and DeFi component of Sonic Chain, providing centralized liquidity, auction function Flare/Snatch, integrated bridging, perpetual contract trading, and high fee rewards for liquidity providers, and plans to launch LaunchPad LSW.
What’s more interesting is that SilverSwap has two asset auction modes. Flare allows users to automatically repurchase their favorite tokens using SilverSwap’s funds/fees.
Flare auction is SilverSwaps repurchase mechanism, which has a cycle of every 12 hours. In each cycle, the platform will accumulate 4.25% of the total transaction fees into a fund pool. Users can bid with AG tokens to designate the fund pool for the repurchase of a specific token. At the end of the cycle, the designated token of the user with the highest bid will be repurchased, and the used AG tokens will be destroyed. This mechanism provides project parties with an efficient way to use AG tokens in their hands to support the price of their tokens, while achieving deflation by destroying AG tokens.
Snatch allows users to earn 42.5% of DEX transaction fees from any liquidity pool deployed on SilverSwap, and the winner will receive AG rewards. The Snatch auction is a user-oriented mechanism. Each liquidity pool will convert 4.25% of the transaction fees generated by the pool into AG tokens in each 12-hour cycle to form a prize pool. Users can bid for the prize pool with AG tokens. At the end of the cycle, the user with the highest bid will receive the AG tokens for the entire prize pool, and the AG tokens they bid will be destroyed. This mechanism not only provides users with the opportunity to obtain additional AG tokens, but also promotes the deflation of platform tokens by destroying AG tokens.
Hedgehog Protocol puts forward an interesting point of view, trading market sentiment, or BASEFEE. This is a kind of indicator similar to the funding rate in perpetual contracts or on-chain Gas, which the project party compares to the pulse of the market.
BASEFEE functions like funding rates for periodic payments exchanged between long and short positions in perpetual futures markets. They keep the market balanced by incentivizing traders to choose the less popular side. Users can use them to gauge market sentiment and look for arbitrage opportunities.
The specific method is to realize the automated behavioral arbitrage of interest rate swaps, cross-platform arbitrage, prediction market transactions, payments and settlements through on-chain smart contracts, directly skipping intermediaries. Users no longer bet on prices, but on behaviors. Of course, the success of this concept depends on the liquidity of the project and the stability of the oracle. The lack of either party will directly shake the underlying theoretical pillars. Now the test network has been opened, but the points details have not been announced. It is still unknown whether the behavior of the test network is related to the later points acquisition.
AI
XAlpha is an alpha platform for AI metrics. It has recently launched a web plug-in that can display incremental information including author insights, token tag mentions, related tokens, and associations with previously tagged accounts when browsing posts in X.
AllianceHub is trained based on a large amount of crypto project data, including their white papers, history, social activities, KOL influence, on-chain data, off-chain information, etc., so as to use AI analysis to skip the personal contact BD or manual research between projects, and directly let the AI system process the multi-level information of the project, including project fundamentals, market activities, social signals, technical details, and then analyze the fit and possibility of cooperation between projects.
It won the second place in the DeFAI hackathon jointly organized by @SonicLabs and @DoraHacks that ended in early April. It now supports mainstream DEXs such as Silo Finance, Aave V3, Beets.fi, Pendle Finance, Shadow, and Sonic native staking platforms such as Angles, Beets, and Beefy. In the next V2 version, a new concept is specially proposed, which promotes DeFAI to DeVibeFAI. The word Vibe is very common in the recent AI Agent craze. Vibe Code means the concept of programming through natural language without programming foundation.
Its main functions involve automatic income strategies intelligent allocation to the best performing strategies and automatic rebalancing regular automatic rebalancing between the highest APY pools. Users can design their own AI DeFi strategies, choose the protocols, assets, and risk levels and conditions they want to participate in, and user-designed strategies will be able to be shared publicly or privately in the future.
As the Sonic ecosystem grows stronger, the previous FUD voice of the founder AC abandoning Famton gradually disappears, and more and more developers join the Sonic ecosystem. Although the community believes that the APR of the chain is still not as good as expected, such a chain focusing on DeFi has also made people more and more looking forward to the birth of a longer-lasting financial model after Binance injected liquidity and in-depth cooperation.
