What is "Sonic," the sub-second network by Fantom?

The well-known public blockchain project Famton team announced the launch of Fantom Sonic testnet, providing developers and users with a preview of sub-second transaction confirmation speeds. What advantages does Fantom Sonic have that make the team hopeful for future development?

What is Fantom Sonic?

Fantom Sonic is the next generation of the Fantom network, replacing the previous Fantom Opera network. This product includes new client-side, validator-side, Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM), Carmen database, and optimized Lachesis consensus mechanism, which will significantly enhance the operational efficiency of the original Fantom network.

Existing smart contracts on Fantom Opera are fully compatible with Fantom Sonic because FVM is fully compatible with EVM and its programming languages Solidity and Vyper. Therefore, users and developers do not need to take any action.

The mainnet is not yet live, but there are two testnets:

• closed testnet: Users cannot submit transactions, and internal developers test data for maximum efficiency.

• open testnet: Open for users and other developers to submit transactions.

The current open testnet is open to the public for testing. The Sonic mainnet is planned to launch in spring 2024.

What are the advantages of Fantom Sonic?

Fantom Sonic can maintain 2,000 TPS while keeping the average finality at 1 second, meaning transactions can be finally confirmed within one second. This provides stronger security compared to Ethereum's 6 minutes or Bitcoin blockchain's 60 minutes final confirmation time, ensuring no possibility of block reorganization.

Fantom Sonic is mainly achieved by three key modules to improve the performance of the Fantom network:

• Optimized Lachesis consensus mechanism: Lachesis is the asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) consensus mechanism used by Fantom Opera, and Sonic optimizes its transaction pooling module for transaction ordering, a key factor in increasing transaction throughput and reducing transaction finalization time.

• Carmen database: Storage space for block transaction information has also been improved. Fantom Sonic reduces storage requirements by 90%, decreasing the data recorded by validator nodes from over 2,000 GB to 300 GB and reducing the data recorded by Archive Nodes from over 11 TB to below 1 TB.

• Fantom Virtual Machine: Sonic uses a new virtual machine that achieves better execution performance compared to the previous Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) implementation. The Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM) seamlessly converts EVM bytecode of smart contracts into the new virtual machine format.

Market Reaction

The native token of Fantom rose from a low of $0.17 to $0.23 this month, marking a 35% increase. However, the author believes that besides technological innovation, it is necessary to return to the actual number of users to evaluate a more realistic understanding of Fantom's use cases. This article is not investment advice.