Understanding Sonic: The Pump.fun of Solana's Gaming Season, Backed by Millions in Funding
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Understanding Sonic: The Pump.fun of Solana's Gaming Season, Backed by Millions in Funding
Sonic's value lies in bridging the last mile of Solana game distribution, enabling games—the golden mine of traffic—to truly realize their potential on Solana.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsLast week, Sonic, a Layer 2 network on Solana, announced the completion of a $12 million Series A funding round. Shortly after, it launched a testnet campaign in collaboration with five ecosystem games, attracting over 45,000 addresses and surpassing 320,000 transactions within just 36 hours. As the only SVM L2 backed by both the Solana Foundation and Galaxy Digital—the largest holder of SOL—Sonic occupies a unique position within the Solana ecosystem. This article explores the emergence of this breakout Solana L2 leader from the perspectives of assets, technology, and value.
TL;DR
- ※ Solana's strong growth (rising from a low of $9 to a high of $200) gives us reason to believe that the leading gaming token of this cycle will emerge from the Solana ecosystem—but it needs a catalyst to ignite consensus.
- ※ Sonic’s value lies in bridging the last mile for game launches on Solana, unlocking the true potential of gaming as a traffic goldmine on the network. Much like how Pump.Fun ignited Solana’s meme “boom” season by enabling easy meme coin creation, Sonic aims to do the same for games.
- ※ Sonic is bringing top EVM-based games to Solana, along with their native users, applications, and liquidity. Through innovations like atomic interoperability and the HyperGrid scaling framework, Sonic eliminates compatibility and migration barriers for game developers on Solana. With its “one-click chain deployment” capability, Sonic secures a distinct niche: becoming Solana’s split-disk.
Where Is the Value? Bridging the Last Mile of Game Launches on Solana
Compared to EVM blockchains, Solana offers speed, low cost, and strong asset liquidity. Yet despite these advantages, it has yet to develop a gaming ecosystem commensurate with its capabilities. The reasons are twofold:
- Lack of consolidated consensus: Solana users tend to favor lightweight, highly liquid, and easily understandable products. In contrast, games are heavy in development and long in release cycles, making them difficult to sustain on a blockchain with short attention spans.
- High development costs: Multi-chain deployment increases fault tolerance, but building games specifically for SVM (Solana Virtual Machine) requires separate development efforts. Given the high development costs and long timelines involved, launching games on Solana remains prohibitively expensive.
As such, gaming—a major source of user traffic—remains an untapped opportunity on Solana.
So where is the breakthrough point? Perhaps we can find clues in the path taken by Pump.Fun, the platform behind Solana’s meme coin boom.
Users who lived through Solana’s “shitcoin season” likely felt the shockwaves caused by Pump.Fun—an infrastructure-level innovation that triggered massive ripple effects. Not long ago, only a few meme coins on Solana attracted attention, much like today’s gaming scene. Then came Pump.Fun, which used bonding curves and automatic migration to AMMs to enable anyone to launch a meme coin with less than $2 via “one-click minting.” This solved the final hurdle in meme coin distribution, rapidly ignited community consensus, and propelled Solana into its current era of explosive meme growth.
This is exactly the value Sonic is now creating—bridging the last mile for game launches on Solana.
Technical Innovation: The First Scaling Architecture, HyperGrid, Enables One-Click Chain Deployment for Every Narrative
Solana—and the broader crypto market—is at an inflection point. Many promising narratives remain confined due to limitations in resources, costs, and infrastructure. Sonic’s technical innovations will allow tens of thousands of games to reach mainstream visibility through Solana.
What Does "Atomic Interoperability" Mean?
Sonic is the first SVM L2 to achieve atomic interoperability with the Solana mainnet, significantly reducing the cost of deploying games on Solana.
If an Arbitrum-based game wants to enter the Solana ecosystem, it no longer needs to rewrite its entire codebase for the incompatible SVM. Its application logic and account system can execute directly on Sonic. It benefits from Solana’s mainnet liquidity and base-layer services while enjoying ultra-fast, low-cost on-chain gaming experiences through Sonic’s execution layer. This is why Sonic has successfully brought several prominent EVM-native games to Solana. For Solana, which currently lacks compelling gaming assets, Sonic acts as a gateway—bringing not only games but also their native applications, users, and liquidity.
HyperGrid Scaling Solution Enables "One-Click Chain Deployment"
HyperGrid is Sonic’s proposed scaling solution that allows any new narrative to quickly deploy on Solana and contribute to its expansion. HyperGrid enables developers to seamlessly deploy new game engines and virtual machines within the Solana environment. Acting as a grid deployment toolkit, it spins up new SVM instances, creating isolated spaces for each new game on the Solana network. Leveraging native game components based on the ECS framework and extensible data types, developers can efficiently build complex game logic and data structures. Additionally, as a scaling architecture, HyperGrid prevents network congestion, allowing more game logic and content to be executed on-chain.
Infrastructure Customized for the Full Game Lifecycle
Beyond this, Sonic integrates infrastructure tailored for Solana game development and deployment—such as sandbox environments, customizable game modules, and scalable data types. Combined with the parallel execution model of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) and localized fee markets, Sonic delivers faster transaction speeds and lower, more stable fees for on-chain gamers, enabling smoother and more responsive gameplay.
Strong Start: Sonic Is Bringing EVM’s Star Games to Solana
Sonic is driving the adoption of diverse gaming narratives on Solana. It is attracting star games from EVM chains such as Arbitrum, Sui, and Ronin, while also promoting integration and expansion within Solana’s native gaming ecosystem. On June 19, Sonic launched a testnet incentive campaign with five games, attracting over 45,000 addresses and exceeding 320,000 transactions within 36 hours. According to the team, Sonic will later launch game nodes, with some high-tier nodes distributed as rewards to participants in the testnet event.
With Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana forming a three-way equilibrium, the public chain landscape is expected to become increasingly complex. Beyond traditional metrics like value and technology, Sonic occupies a crucial ecological role: it will become Solana’s split-disk.
According to the "Ponzi Three-Disk Theory" proposed by Crypto Weituo, an ecosystem typically consists of three core components: mutual support disks, dividend disks, and split-disks. Mutual support disks, represented by MEMEs, generate temporal capital mismatches through fair launches and full circulation. Dividend disks, typified by DeFi, involve users investing a lump sum upfront and receiving linear returns over time. Sonic’s “one-click chain deployment” fills the missing split-disk component in Solana’s ecosystem. As Solana continues its strong upward trajectory, Sonic will bring more low-cost new investment opportunities and incremental capital.
This is just the beginning. The immense value of gaming—as a fiercely contested source of user traffic—has already been proven throughout crypto history. Starting with Sonic, we will see a wider variety of games emerge on Solana, growing user consensus around gaming assets, and more infrastructure projects like Sonic that deliver real value to the Solana ecosystem.
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