Sonic reaches $1 billion TVL while expanding stablecoin infrastructure

0:01I'm Ashton Addison from the Crypto Coin Show and today on Blockchain Interviews, we have back with us Michael Kong, CEO of Sonic Labs. Michael, welcome back to the show and thanks for being here. Hey Ashton, it's been a while, but thanks again for the invite. Definitely. So much has happened at Sonic. Last time we spoke we were talking about Phantom

0:20and there's been a whole major shift with the entire protocol and the team has had significant growth in the last four months since the launch as well. I would love to hear all those updates but maybe you can talk at the beginning here about for a sort of like a high level on what is a sonic protocol, what makes it unique and you know what are some of the

0:43functioning parts of it and then we can dive into all those latest updates. Yeah, sure. So like first and foremost like the Sonic network is built on very much a improved technology stack from the Phantom network. So we spend a lot of time focusing on basically achieving scalability in two ways and it comes down to transactions per second which is basically the network capacity

1:05or how many transactions can your network handle per second and more importantly in my opinion what's known as like time to finality right or how long does it take for a transaction to be confirmed the analogy I would like to use is you know when you look at Google right the number of queries that Google can process per is equivalent to like you know transactions

1:26per second for the sonic network and how fast and how accurate you know the query is returned back to the user is equivalent to confirmation times. So on an individual basis the confirmation times and what the users really care about not the transactions per second. In the aggregate though the transactions per second matter because if you have low transactions per second

1:48or low network capacity it means that the ability for your your applications to gain large numbers of users is really limited. and that you know if you start reaching high your transaction per second limit then your confirmation time start experiencing a lot longer and that's pretty much what we had experienced in Phantom in 2021. So Phantom in 2021

2:13obviously got a lot of traction it was known as like the D5 chain back then for a number of reasons. It was getting a lot of applications. it was getting a lot of users but we had occasions where there was so much traction and so much stuff happening on the network that it just slowed down the network that transactions that were usually confirming in about a

2:35second or two were taking you know 15 seconds 30 seconds etc and that's simply because the network was not scalable enough. Now we've solved a lot of those problems through a lot of what we call performance engineering on the database side and the smart contract processing side such that you know a lot of those issues are a thing of the past. You know just to highlight a couple

2:55of like data points like by by chainspec you know they announced I think like two or three days ago that there was one block that processed like over a thousand transactions in that single block. I think off the top of my head like 1,122 transactions and that was all confirmed in under 0.5 seconds in a single block. All finalized one block finality and if you

3:20extrapolate that across transactions per second was over 2,000 transactions per second and a lot of those were smart contract based transactions. I mean this is like many many fold more than the Phantom network and that's very important because you know as the network is getting traction as it has been with you know particularly on the DeFi side with over half a billion

3:40dollars in USC bridged issuance and over a billion dollars in TVL it means that the network is still very very smooth and if you go to soniccan.org or and you look at the block times how how fast blocks are produced or transactions are confirmed on the network it's like of the order of like 400 milliseconds or 0.4 seconds. So that is in a nutshell you know the

4:04difference with say Sonic as opposed to Phantom and you know there's a lot of differences as well on the business side that I guess we can get into on this interview as well. Yeah. No, that's a great intro Michael and that's a great problem to have. So I think that there's so much demand and there's a lot of transactions that you know now there's a

4:21new problem of like let's solve for further scalability and that looks to have been solved with Sonic but yeah it's better to have that problem where there's a lot of there's a lot of traffic and yeah the DeFi chain continues to grow strong. I'd be curious to jump into the DeFi insights and see where that is compared to, you know, the overall crypto scheme. And I think

4:43there's been a lot of traction despite the sentiment in the first quarter of 2025. I think maybe people were hoping for the moon with the Trump administration, but I think we really needed to have a little bit of breathing room because there's been such growth in the last two years since we spoke with Phantom and just the Bitcoin ETFs coming out, institutions

5:05coming in, setting us up for even more widespread adoption outside of the people that are already in the echo chamber of crypto to get new players in. And I think that's what is great for Sonic to set up for the future as this found out foundation has been laid to now get new people in that are maybe they're hardcore web 2 users, maybe they're just casual computer users to

5:30actually onboard them into web 3. Yeah, I totally agree there. like as I've said before in like other interviews you know I look at blockchain adoption akin to like internet adoption I it's interesting always watching like old clips that you can see on like YouTube and some people uploaded about people using the internet in the early days in 1990s and people

5:53were like you know oh what is a web browser or what is a mouse you know what is the internet you know oh I can like you know you know buy stuff and stuff well this is like quite weird but also like interesting and I think it's like a similar thing to blockchain is that you know blockchain a lot you know is obviously talked about a lot you know it's talked a lot by you

6:15know the Trump administration and people within the Trump administration but if you look at like actual adoption and how many people actually like holding and using cryptocurrency assets it's still very very few people I mean just anidonally like you know I have I know a lot of people who I know a lot of people who are not in the crypto space and I talked to them and a lot of them are

6:32still not in the crypto space despite you know what how much it's like talked about you know particularly in like US politics these days and that to me is a good sign because it still means that we're early days and I think you know a lot of people are still getting used to oh you know how do transactions work oh how do browsers work you know how does

6:50all this stuff kind of work and I think you know the user experience in many aspects user experience when it comes down to like chain performance which is what confirmation times is about you know helps on board people. User experience in terms of you know the applications that are coming on board. They're always trying to make you know it easier to submit and execute

7:13transactions obviously. And then you look at it from like say the wallet point of view that you know wallets keep upgrading and keep making it very very easy for a lot easier for users to be on boarded. So I think you know over time the user experience improves. I mean that's naturally what happens with technology. You know, you look at what the how the internet first began. It

7:34was very clunky and stuff and it wasn't that pretty. Now it's a lot more sophisticated and pretty and easier for people to use. And on the other side, it's just like education over time that the more people are aware of it network effects, the more they, you know, play around with the blockchain and the transactions, the more they get used to that kind of

7:52environment. And so in terms of crypto adoption, it's still very early on, but I think there's a lot more a lot more people going to join over time that it's just like a matter of time for the reasons I outlined. Definitely. And you know, a lot of people obviously they first hear about Bitcoin, then they start going down the rabbit hole to Ethereum and

8:14other layer 1 protocols. How do you think that chain connects from when people first hear about crypto and as you said they're they're hearing about it but they don't really get it and they don't actually own it yet and then they own some Bitcoin and then they start going in. How does that chain connect and how can you shorten that chain for

8:32them to join into the Sonic ecosystem and test out the different DAPs whether it's DeFi NFTTS just doing transactions on the network. How can you increase that adoption earlier on in a person's crypto journey? Yeah, that's a very deep question. So, usually, you know, most people have heard about Bitcoin even even if they don't own it. A lot of people would have also have

8:57heard about Ethereum as well. So, they're like in a way kind of like the gateway, right? Just naturally because they're just like the biggest cryptos that are out there. So, naturally, I think a lot of people when they start their crypto journey, you know, it was the case for me, although it was like quite a few years ago. So there were like fewer coins around.

9:14but you know usually you know you start off with Bitcoin and then you discover like Ethereum and you discover like all these other tokens as well. I don't see that like like changing as a whole. I don't see there being like many users to be honest who are completely non-crypto and suddenly their first crypto is Sonic. I think to some extent that is the case because you know

9:35we're getting involved in like non-crypto marketing. Sometimes you know people's friends tell their friends who are not crypto to begin you know start using Sonic and that obviously like is the preferable like customer we want to get in because they're the ones who have only like really experienced Sonic and I think they're having a really good time there you know

9:54with all the different yield opportunities with the much more scalable behavior that it has say compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum but usually you know it's obviously Bitcoin and Ethereum that most people sell off with and that's fine because you know people get familiar with their environment ment with Bitcoin and Ethereum and then they look at like

10:11other tokens and other opportunities that are out there. You know, they kind of like go down the list of coin market cap so to speak. And that's fine because what we're trying to market to them is like, hey, you want to come on to Sonic because you're going to have a good time. All right, it's secure. There's all these yield opportunities. There's all this different stuff that

10:30you can do on chain. And the mainet is very very smooth. you know, as I outlined that, you know, during, you know, peak performance times, during less performance times, in terms of the number of transactions being processed in a given amount of time, you know, the network is just running smooth as butter. And so, if you look at like a

10:49lot of the marketing that, you know, we've been doing on our account, Sonic at Sonic Labs account or my own personal account at Michael F. Kong you'll see that a lot of it is just talking about the opportunities that exist on the network that if you're a user you know there's all these DeFi opportunities there's to some extent these NFT opportunities and games that

11:08are on board and I also like put out posts talking about you know why as a user you know should you be using Sonic as opposed to others and also to developers why as a developer should you deploy on Sonic as opposed to others and so in my opinion when it comes to down to business it's all about putting putting yourself in the other person's position and saying why would I want to

11:29buy from myself why would I want to use my own product and if you can answer that you know why would a dev want to deploy on Sonic why would a user want to use Sonic if you can answer that question really well then you're basically doing your job I love that and I want to talk about the users of the apps after this but before that you actually need to have apps and

11:50that's where the developer experience comes in I did see your recent ex post about why Why are developers choosing Sonic? You know, it's no fun if you have an iPhone with an app store that only has five apps. You get bored right away. It's great to have a variety. And obviously making the developer experience as easy as possible for innovators and entrepreneurs to come

12:11in and develop an app and choose Sonic to for that environment to build the app out of any of the other potential blockchains maybe maybe multi-chain but how does the protocol make it easy to develop apps and incentivize developers to choose Sonic as the place to do it? Yeah. Yeah. So, as you mentioned, it's like a bit of a chicken egg problem, right? That obviously to get the users,

12:34you need to have developers. To get, you know, developers, you need to have users. So, the way we kind of like dealt with that early on, which is like what other chains have done is simply like by like incentives, right? So, we have a like an airdrop program that if you interact with the chain in certain ways, you acrew these points and

12:53then these points will allow you to claim tokens over time, right? And so that you know makes it attractive for users to get on board but it also makes it attractive for developers because developers know that if they deploy on the network they are are going to have users that want to interact with their application because they can earn eventually like an airdrop and also we

13:12had other incentives called the gems program separate to that where we basically give out what we call gems to developers who deploy on the network and they can choose how they want to distribute that to users and we've also done direct grants as to projects that we think you know would be great for growing the Sonic ecosystem and great for users and

13:33so you know we've given projects a variety of grants some that have deployed on other chains have come to our chain some native projects deployed on the old chain the phantom chain also came over the Sonic and so you know we have incentives out there not because incentives are you know something that can last forever because obviously they can't but they allow you

13:54to get the ball rolling, right? They allow you to start the momentum of the network effects. And as long as you're able to do that, it's kind of like a snowball, right? You know, you'll start getting more users organically. You'll start getting more developers organically as the user base grows and stuff because it's a bigger, you know, customer base for developers and

14:14then eventually you have a very thriving e ecosystem and that's what we want to have in the end. And this is why the technology is very important because if you don't have like scalable technology ena to enable the snowball to take effect and become as big as possible the number of users and number of developers then you're always going to be limited

14:31in your growth. Definitely. And you mentioned and one of the staples of Phantom was that it was the DeFi chain. I think DeFi is one of the greatest use cases right now that we have in terms of DAPs or any financial applications just bringing more utility to the coins that we have on the networks. When you as you said you're putting yourself

14:56in the shoes of the developers or the users what do you see as things that need to be there for a great DeFi ecosystem on Sonic? You know, you me you keep mentioning the yields, which is great, and the security and just the experience of doing transactions and settling and stuff like that. Are those the main things that are going to help continue to drive DeFi on Sonic? Yeah,

15:21it comes down to ultimately like what people want, right? and a thriving like DeFi ecosystem the base of it is a lending and borrowing protocol where the lending rates are competitive to other chains or other opportunities outside of crypto, right? This is why like lending and big lending and borrowing protocols like silo and a that have deployed on Sonic

15:45are very important. Because if you have a lot of stable coins in particular that can be borrowed on the network, it means that those stable coins can then be used in like other aspects of DeFi, you know, whether it's like trading, you know, long per etc. It really is like the foundation for a thriving DeFi ecosystem. And so, you know, you see that like on Ethereum, you

16:11see it on other networks. The big DeFi ecosystems really stem from that. So as long as we have like a lot of people willing to like lend and borrow on chain for whatever reason you know it could be for you know tax effective reasons it could be for you know more speculative reasons it could be for any reason then that's the basis for a thriving ecosystem. That's why we directed a

16:33lot of initial early incentives towards these lending and borrowing protocols and it's going really well. You know, as I mentioned earlier, we've got, you know, over half a billion dollars now in bridge USC. I think the total stable coin issuance is like 600 or 700 million. A week or two ago, we passed the 1 billion TVL mark. Now, TVL is not the only metric that's imported. But

16:55it is like an indicator of the level of activity that's happening. And you can see that some applications have done extraordinarily well including for example shadow which is a native like V3 free variation that's deployed on Sonic. I think it's like the seventh or the sixth most like fee generating app in the entire world and that's just on

17:18Sonic itself. and they've made tens of millions of dollars in fees and they've only deployed for about four months now and they're doing really really well and part of their success about why they're doing well is because they just have such a great user experience. If you go to shadow so exchange and you want to you know deposit into the concentrated liquidity pools or trade

17:39and all that they have deep liquidity and they have they integrated with a number of other protocols in the network and you just get like really good rates. So as long as you have the foundation there which is you know this deep liquidity via lending and borrowing protocols everything else on top of it u works really really well and is very smooth. Yeah. No that's really great to hear

18:00with the recent deployment of the USDC and the TVL milestone of a billion. That's great. Can you talk more about stable coins and the USDC? Is there because obviously that's important for DeFi or for lending and borrowing. You don't want to be borrowing something that's super volatile and then, you know, doubles in price and you owe a lot more. Stable coins are so important

18:21for DeFi. And I think the Trump administration or the legislators are coming out with more legislation to help adoption of stable coins because I think the institutions also understand they're that it's integral for them if they're going to be moving billions of dollars to be using stable coins as well. So that was a recent deployment of USDC on Sonic. So

18:47do you have can you bridge USDC from from other chains or do you just use Sonic to buy the stable coin? How do you how do you get into that? How does that exactly work? Yeah. So users can bridge the stable coins from other chains. So we have our own native bridge that we call the Sonic Gateway. That's a very very secure bridge which basically

19:08generates receipts from Ethereum when you bridge any asset from Ethereum that's listed including USC over to Sonic which means that in the very unlikely event the bridge were to go down for whatever reason after 14 days you'll be able to get your money back. So there's a lot of security and fail has gone into Sonic gateway. We also have and in the process of doing more of

19:31it what we call formal verification which is ma mathematical proofs as to the proof system and security of the Sonic gateway. So we have our own native bridge that a lot of people have used from Ethereum to Sonic. But they're also third party bridges as well that you know you have to trust their security but do make it easy for people to bridge over from other chains.

19:53So, for example, you know, there's like Rhino Bridge. There's Dbridge as well that allowed you to bridge USC from a variety of different chains from Salana and Avalanche and I think maybe like up to 20 different chains and not only be able to bridge USC from that chain to our chain, but if you have other assets, be able to swap out of

20:17those assets to USC on Sonic as well. And so there's a lot of there's also a lot of influence that have come from there as well. But what's also very important to note is that unlike Phantom Sonic is going to have native USC issued there's going to be announcement very soon as to like the specific date of when that happens. But as we already announced with Circle,

20:42we've got native USC coming to Sonic and that's really important for a couple of reasons. most important reason is to do with security. Native issuance means that every single USC that's issued on Sonic is backed fully by the reserves at Circle, meaning that you can always take your one USC on Sonic or you will be able to and be able to go to Circle theoretically and redeem

21:08that for one US dollar. Is also very important because you know a lot of people have have trusted native USC on other chains etc. And so, you know, there's a trust element involved there. And also what's notable about this native USC deployment on Sonic as opposed to others is that when native USCC was deployed on other chains, it was alongside what was

21:36already called bridge USC, right? And so that means that on some other chains to this day, you still have two different kind of USCC tokens. You have the native USCC token, you have the bridge USC token and you have to like manually swap it yourself if you want to and that's create a lot of problems because it creates liquidity fragmentation problems

21:55right which means that you don't have as deep liquidity pools for the native USC our implementation because we followed the bridged USC standard that was taken from circle itself means that we'll be able to upgrade the bridge USC token to the native USCC token and hand control over to circle meaning that all the bridge USC will automatically be converted to native USC and all the

22:19protocols that currently support the bridge USC will also support the native USC and so it's a much more seamless experience u compared to how it was done in the past because the way that circle operates the upgrade standards now which are really really good for us because we're not going to have a separate bridge USCC token that's going to like exist forever out there that's that like

22:40applications will have to you know swap from the bridge USCC to the native USC it will all happen like under the hood. So I think that's very very exciting. And it's going to be really really good for the ecosystem. Yeah, I completely agree and I've had that personal issue. I had you know this bridge USDC and I think it confuses a lot of people. They're like, "They're

23:01both USDC, but this pool, like I can't swap it, and it's like, why is this, you know, that's one of the barriers to mainstream adoption and like why are there multiple tokens that are almost the same and I can't figure it out?" Even technical people are having problems. So, I'm glad and it's also kind of like confusing to people as well. Like, you know, if you if you're

23:21like, you know, into crypto a lot, you know, you probably know the difference between like a bridged and a native, but if you're new to crypto, you're not going to really know the difference. And so, you're not going to be sure. Okay, there's two USDC tokens here. You know, which one do I use? You know, it's kind of like having, you know, bridge US

23:37dollar. You know, just imagine like walking around the US, you have bridge US dollar and then you have like US dollar. You have two different sets of nodes. It can be confusing to people. Definitely. And I'm glad that's being solved on Sonic. Now, I want to look at you know, DeFi from a very high level in like all the chains there's fragmented liquidity. It's not

23:59perfect to be able to bridge even on the same chain, you know, different pools. There's little diff differentiations and then between chains as well. Where do you see DeFi in the coming years, you know, increasing the liquidity potentially? Obviously, this is a great step with the USDC merging in with the bridge one. What about with other

24:19chains? Or how can we increase liquidity so we can get clo you know a pinch closer to kind of stock market traditional finance liquidity which traditional and institutional investors are used to. We need to upgrade DeFi. Yeah. So a lot of it just really comes down to you know as I mentioned in my one of my earlier answers just comes down to like adoption over time. So

24:46the more you know people that use crypto they'll start converting some of the you know non-crypto assets to crypto assets and that's how ultimately you know you're going to get a similar level of liquidity to what you have on the stock market. Now I don't think you know crypto is going to have the same or very similar level to what we have on the

25:05stock markets because that's an enormous amount of money and you know a lot of people have exposure to the stock market. A lot of people have exposure by default, you know, via their retirement accounts and then they probably don't even like really know that or pay much attention to it. But you know, I think there's still going to be substantial growth in DeFi and

25:25it's going to be some, you know, substantial fraction of the total value of the stock market. So over time, it's just about adoption. You know, at Sonic Labs, you know, we're trying to appeal to crypto and non-crypto users. And the crypto users that we're appealing to, you know, are obviously like people who already have assets on chain. On different networks. So we want them to

25:43bridge over like bridge over the USCC from other networks onto our network. Now that's now that's good for us, you know, it grows our network. But net in terms of crypto, you know, if one person moves from one project to another, there's still the same amount of crypto assets or same number of, you know, tokens out there overall for the for the for the entire ecosystem.

26:04And so if you're talking about in aggregate the cryptocurrency industry, it's about getting new people in. And over time that's just going to happen as more people hear about crypto, as more people experience it, as more people get used to it, as they more people tell their friends, as the applications become more sophisticated, as the user experience becomes easier. Just like

26:27the internet, you know, the internet started off a small and kind of niche in the early 1990s and now it's absolutely massive with a whole bunch of different applications that are out there and you know users you know the early users you know told their friends about what they could do they joined and then they told their friends to join and you know

26:44that's how you basically have the network effect take place and I think something similar is happening to crypto. It's still early days but the adoption will just increase more and more and more over time. I mean, just to highlight, you know, a little statistic that I remember reading about a couple years ago, every year on Ethereum, the number of users went up, even during

27:05the so-called bare market. So, if you looked at like 2018, how many people were using Ethereum, the number of transactions submitted, it was higher than in 2017. And so, even though obviously the price of Ethereum, you know, was was lower in 2018 than 2017 on average, you still had adoption year on year. And why is that? is because despite you know the market conditions

27:26people were telling their friends about Ethereum and they were getting involved and I think that trend is just going to continue and you know it's just mathematical that you know network effects are exponential you know one person tells two people they told four they tell eight etc and that's what we're and that's what we're seeing in crypto yeah no it's it's great to see

27:48that those adoption numbers aren't just because of the price and of When Bitcoin goes up and gets in the news and new people hear about it, it's great for adoption, but then people actually see the fundamental value of global currency and decentralized networks and then they stick around, you know, even if the price goes down a little bit. Eventually, it's probably

28:09going to go to new new all-time highs and keep going. But, you know, I'd hope like us, people are in it for the technology, understanding that this is the next evolution of the internet and of money. So I'm I'm hoping we can get a killer app that brings in hundreds of millions of new users. It might not be as easy as that, but there's definitely adoption. There's so

28:31many different chains, so many different applications. We're getting to gaming, not just finance, but all the other use cases are all bleeding in a little bit of blockchain in there as well. So, I think we're getting that adoption we need, but it's going to take time. Of course, the stock market's been around for decades and decades that crypto is still in its infancy. So, I

28:51I'd love to hear some of the future plans for you and the team at Sonic for 2025. You know, the networks has only been launched for a few months now and it has significant growth so far, but I'm sure that there's much more up the sleeve. Can you talk a little bit about the road map and any of the planned releases or what the team's working on behind the scenes?

29:14Yeah, so there's a lot of things that are happening like on the technical side. We announced recently that we have a new consensus engine that's under development. Actually, it's being developed. It's just under testing now that will also be mathematically verified in terms of like how it confirms transactions to a large degree. We haven't named that yet. I just

29:33call it consensus 2.0 at the moment. So that's something that when I spoke internally with the team, they are confident they can release this year. They've already released some preliminary numbers and that you know running nodes is a lot more efficient. I think you know 68% reduction in memory which means that if you're a node provider you know you can run on lower

29:54Specification hardware and have the same performance as you do right now which significantly lowers cost because you don't have to have as much RAM available. We also have like a two times performance improvement in terms of consensus speed. So, you know, you look at like how fast that transactions already be confirmed on the network. It'll even be a lot faster than that.

30:16And there's all these other benefits that, you know, I don't want to frontun the technology team about because it's still, you know, getting more confident on the numbers, but they're looking really, really good. So, if people out there think that, you know, the Sonic technology is already great, which I honestly think it is, that it is the best technology stack out there that's

30:32already in production, it's going to be even a lot better. On a few other technical matters that are more I guess like directly like business related. We've got like three other like main features that are coming out. So already we've already launched like fe monetization but we're making the onboarding user experience process a lot better where people can just like reg

30:53register register themselves rather than relying on the foundation at the moment which is quite manual. So that's expanding. But we've also got other ideas currently under development such as gas subsidies, account obstruction, and dynamic fees. And of the phrase that I mentioned there, the most exciting to me is the dynamic fees because it means

31:14that applications will be able to determine what their transaction fees are going to be for their specific application. So, the problem right now with crypto as a whole is that the transaction fees are determined on a networkwide basis, not on an application basis. And why is that important is because you want to have a competitive marketplace. You want applications to be

31:33able to set a fee such that you know they're able to make as much money as they can via fee monetization which is you get 90% of the transaction fee that your application generates. But you don't want to do it to such an extent that you start alienating your users, right? And so over time you have applications competing on transaction

31:54fees and users will you know figure out okay I want to I'm happy to use this kind of application because you know I'm willing to pay this certain amount of transaction fee as opposed to another application and so you just get better like price dynamics because you have a more competitive market of transaction fees. But in terms of the others like

32:11gas subsidies, it's about an account obstruction, it's about on boarding users, right? So with gas subsidies, allowing people to pay for other people's transaction costs means that you know one person if they want to like subsidize their users to get them on board because maybe they don't have s to pay for their initial transactions, they're able to do that

32:31very very easily via an interface. And our town obstruction, which I think a lot of crypto people are familiar with, is also about you know being able to onboard users because it allows you know to delegate your your some permissions from your wallet to another account and so you can get more like int what we call like intense based applications running which just improves

32:54the user experience if people want that. So there are these like you know four key business features that are on development. one that's already launched, which is the theme monetization, which we've already seen tremendous traction on. There's already been hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of claims, even though the network's only been live for the past

33:11few months, as you mentioned. And so, those are the key features that we're focusing on. And on the business side, it's really just expanding to different DeFi applications that are out there that are being on boarded. Also a few other games as well, NFT projects that you know, I don't want to front any announcements as well. and hosting a lot more community events

33:33as well. So this year, you know, we launched Sonic University. We launched Sonic Sodas, which means that we help sponsor events around the world that allow people to, you know, to talk about Sonic, have speakers, you know, we've had events in like Australia and London and Lisbon and in some other like smaller countries as well that people don't really think about that much like

33:55Nigeria, which is a big crypto scene, and elsewhere. We're hosting more events, more dinners for you know certain people in the network etc. So a lot of it's just really about outreach and as long as you know the strategy is working which seems to be working at the moment which is you know getting those numbers up and scaling up the network then we should just keep executing on

34:19the strategy. Yeah. No, those are some incredible updates Michael and you know I've worked recently with gasp which is a gasless DEX. I saw that they just integrated Sonic and you know they're I'm not sure exactly how it's working but they're subsidizing the gas fee so you can trade without paying the transaction fee on there. But I think that dynamic fees function is

34:41incredible. I think right now the way that it's set up on other blockchains where if there's one killer app and all the transactions are going through there and then there's other applications they're s subject to the whole network of oh you know this one app is clogging up the network and now we have to pay high fees on a different app. We need to have more business sense in that

35:02where there could be more competition and you can set it whether it's through subsidies or other ways to drive competition between apps. So, I think that's something that's definitely needed in the blockchain industry. I'm glad to see that coming out on Sonic. Yeah, for sure. And sorry, just to kind of elaborate on the importance of like you know, dynamic fees, you

35:22know, some people might be willing to pay more to use certain applications than others, right? So, I can envision that, you know, when it comes to gaming, you know, games want to set low transaction fees because they want to get as many users as possible. And obviously when people are playing a game they're submitting they can submit quite a few transactions there. So if

35:41the transaction fees are high for game then it becomes you know not really feasible for people to want to play the game because they're paying so much. So I can envision that probably a lot of games out there will set very very low fees because they're all focused on volume. But say a DeFi application where there's yield opportunities etc and maybe less in transactions on a per

36:00individual basis. They're probably going to charge a much higher fee because you know people are willing to pay that much higher fee because they're already earning more and they're submitting fewer transactions on average than say playing a game. So this is why dynamic fees are important because you don't want to set one fee for the whole network where you know maybe it's too

36:20little for DeFi applications, maybe it's way too much for gaming. You want to have the applications be able to choose it to basically suit their user base in the end. Definitely. No, I'm looking forward to seeing that and the other updates that you mentioned as well. What's the best way to follow along with these updates that you're talking about

36:37and also just to test out the current apps on Sonic? And I saw the NFT post. It looks like that's also hot. So, I know there's all these different industries that are already live on Sonic. What's the best way to explore the ecosystem and then stay up to date? Yeah, so if you want to stay up to date, we push our announce announcements usually first and foremost on X or

36:59Twitter. Which is you know pretty typical in crypto projects. So you can follow our account at Sonic Labs. You can follow my personal account at Michael Fong as well. You know people follow Andre's account and there's a few other accounts as well. I'm associated with the main account at Sonic Labs. In terms of getting on boarded, you can go to our website,

37:22soniclabs.com, and on the front page, we have a three-step process as a developer, as a user on how to get on boarded, as well as further details, obviously about the team and the airdrop and more technical documentation. So, I'd encourage people to go to sonicabs.com to get started. Sounds great, Michael. Thank you so much for all these insights into protocols,

37:46DeFi, stable coins, and everything else and how Sonic is innovating in blockchain. I love to see it. I'm hoping we can get some more of those killer DAPs. And regardless just upgrading the user experience, the fee experience, the speed of transactions and confirmations as you mentioned in the beginning as well. I'm definitely going to go test out some

38:09more apps in the ecosystem as well myself. I've been in it a little bit, but there's so much to explore and I know there's a lot of development going on the chain right now. So, I'm wishing you and the team all the best and would love to follow up again in the near future. Yeah, for sure Ashton. Again, like appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for

38:26reaching out.