Can Sonic be reborn in the world of Decentralized Finance? Overview of popular ecosystem projects, Airdrop participation, and tokenomics.

The recent downturn in the market and the fading popularity of meme coins have gradually cooled market speculation, allowing funds to return from high-risk, low-value speculative targets to areas that can bring stable profits - DeFi is one of them. Can Sonic be the next DeFi hotspot with its strengths? Let's look down together! (Synopsis: Alpha Nuggets, Sonic DeFi Rising Star Rome: Introducing "Double Staking Mechanism + Proof of Burning" to Build a Sustainable Token Economy) (Background supplement: Alpha Nuggets, Sonic Eco BTC. ETH. USDT liquidity mining strategy, Rings Protocol TVL soars five times in a single week) Sonic, FTM background introduction Sonic is a high-performance blockchain evolved from Fantom($FTM), Sonic native token $S With the mainnet launch at the end of 2024, it officially replaces $FTM with a 1:1 exchange rate. The core idea of evolution is to build Sonic into a Layer1 token with DeFi advantages, and the following four advantages have a considerable impact on on-chain interactions: Efficiency and fees: Sonic can process up to 10,000 transactions per second (10,000 TPS) with transaction fees of less than $0.01, a feature that will help improve investors' on-chain interactive experience. EVM compatible: Developers can directly migrate Ethereum-applicable smart contracts to the Sonic chain, making it easier for Sonic to deploy DeFi projects than non-EVM blockchains such as Solana and Aptos. Heavyweight Leader: Sonic is led by Andre Cronje, known as the godfather of DeFi. Total lock-up volume steadily rising: According to DeFiLlama, Sonic's total lock-up volume (TVL) at the beginning of 2025 was only 26 m, and as of this writing, the data has reached 653 m, an increase of more than 25 times in three months, which shows investors' recognition of Sonic DeFi. Sonic Chain's DeFi Ecosystem Decentralized Exchange (DEX)-Shadow Exchange Shadow Exchange has become a DEX leader on Sonic with the following highlights: x(3,3) incentive model: Shadow changes the original ve(3,3) model of FTM, so that users can exit liquidity early and no longer need to lock positions for a long time. Platform Tokens: Launch $Shadow as platform rewards and redeem them for $xShadow staking tokens, $xShadow will be used to earn protocol fees and voting incentives. TVL surge: Shadow Exchange's total lock-up volume (TVL) has now reached 59m, which is in a state of decline but still more than three times higher than the previous month. At present, the liquidity pool (LP) on the Shadow Exchange provides considerable annualized returns, taking the Sonic native token $S and stablecoin $USDC as an example, as can be seen from the figure below, even if the safest LP allocation plan is chosen, the estimated annualized is still as high as 327%. Decentralized lending platform - Eggs Finance Eggs Finance focuses on depositing $S into smart contracts and minting $Eggs as collateral tokens, but minting transactions requires a 2.5% fee, after minting, users can use $Eggs to borrow $S equivalent to 99% of its value, which is equivalent to a loan-to-value ratio of 99%. The minimum loan term is 1 day and the maximum is 365 days, and the loan interest rate is calculated on a linear basis and charged at the time of loan initiation, with a base interest rate of 0.05%. It is important to note that if the loan defaults, EGGS as collateral will be destroyed. GameFi - Petroleum Finance Petroleum Finance is a 3D world-themed GameFi where players buy land and refineries to produce COIL, which is then refined into tradable OIL. In particular, Petroleum Finance airdropped 25 $COIL to specific NFT holders (Derp and Goggles) within the Sonic ecosystem as an early community incentive. Sonic tokenomics $S is converted from $FTM token 1:1, so the token distribution needs to be traced back to the FTM token TGE, the following figure shows Fantom's token distribution, which totaled about 3.18 billion during the upgrade of Sonic. User rewards and airdrops: 32.75% Founders and teams: 25.49% Investors: 41.76% The total supply of $S when the Sonic mainnet was launched was 3.175 billion, but the official announced that an additional 6% (about 190 million) tokens would be minted as an airdrop incentive reward, mainly in the hope of increasing the use of Sonic through these tokens and attracting investors to use Sonic for DeFi activities, and the airdrop participation method will be explained later. Sonic Airdrop Burn Mechanism Many investors may be worried about whether the additional minted $S will be bearish news for long-term prices, so Sonic officially introduced the following three burning mechanisms to prevent excessive inflation of tokens. Airdrop Elastic Destruction Mechanism The additional 6% airdrop reward minted by Sonic is unlocked by a linear decline mechanism, and the more special part is that Sonic officially allows users to claim the airdrop reward $S in advance, but the sooner you claim it, the less rewards can be claimed, and the unclaimed part will be permanently destroyed. The following figure is a linear chart of Sonic airdrop destruction, with the x-axis being the time and the y-axis being the number of percent destroyed. Airdrop destruction example If the author receives a 1000$S airdrop reward, and the official agrees that each user will receive 25% (250 coins) when the airdrop event is announced, there will be 750 $S to unlock. After 90 days, I am not optimistic about the prospects of $S and want to receive an airdrop to sell, according to the picture above, I will receive about 1/3 of the tokens (250 coins), and the remaining 500 tokens will be permanently burned. Compared with traditional airdrops (such as $ARB), such a mechanism can not only allow investors to use airdrops flexibly, but also effectively reduce the circulation of $S. Fee Monetization Inspired by the Web2 ad revenue model promoted by platforms such as YouTube, Sonic decided to introduce monetization mechanisms to incentivize developers to build on the Sonic blockchain: Non-monetized applications: If a user submits a transaction on an application that does not participate in monetization, 50% of the Gas Fee will be burned and the remaining amount will be passed on to the ecosystem vault and validators. Monetized applications: If a user submits a transaction on an application that participates in monetization, up to 90% of the Gas Fee will be paid to the developer of the application, and the remaining amount will be paid to the validator. Useless token burning for sure...