Sonic Labs CEO Matt Visser says the crypto industry’s old narrative has stopped working and that blockchains now need products that can generate real revenue. In a public letter, he said the company’s leadership handoff and transition have taken longer than expected but are nearing the finish line.
Visser wrote that crypto made big promises at the outset and never delivered on its core claim of transforming financial services. He argued that the era many people still think of as a temporary cycle — the old "crypto summer" — is not coming back in the same form. In his telling, the industry still runs pseudo-decentralized protocols with centralized single points of failure, relies on offchain operations, and has never learned how to protect users through self-regulation. He also said the slogan "code is law" has been abused for years and has helped keep ordinary, non-crypto-native users out.
A changed market, and a changed standard
Visser said the world has changed and that crypto needs to adapt to that reality. Over the past year, total crypto market capitalization has nearly been cut in half, with about $2 trillion erased. He argued that the value did not vanish; it moved to places with better use cases and better economics. What remains is still sizable, he said, but the market is no longer willing to buy the old DeFi story or broad claims about the future of finance.
He contrasted crypto’s struggles with other parts of the market. Even after the Iran war, he wrote, the global rebalancing process has gone better than expected. China reduced imports, the US increased some of its own exports, and the physical shortages feared at the start of the conflict never fully materialized. The S&P 500 has moved back to record highs. AI capital spending is still expanding. Crypto, by comparison, is still stumbling. His conclusion was blunt: blockchain technology companies need to grow up.
He pointed to Robinhood and Polygon as examples of that shift. Robinhood is moving first with Robinhood Chain, he said, while Polygon is turning into a payments company. Sonic has reached the same conclusion: if a product does not produce revenue, even the best technology in the world does not matter enough.
Aave’s proposal as a live example
Visser used Aave’s latest governance move to make that point concrete. Last week, Aave proposed shutting down its Sonic deployment along with deployments on five other chains and around 50 low-adoption assets across its markets. He said Aave founder Stani had made clear the move was not aimed at any specific L1 or L2, and Visser said he believed that because the reasoning fits the larger argument of the letter.
According to Visser, deposits in Sonic’s Aave market have fallen to about $7.6 million and are generating less than $5,000 per quarter for Aave, not enough to cover maintenance costs. Against Aave’s $14 billion book, he said, the number is almost too small to matter. But he did not treat it as a minor footnote. For him, it is the lesson in plain view: integrations done for the sake of a launch announcement rather than real transaction volume will get cut, and they should. The fix is not to pile on more integrations. It is to build products on Sonic that can earn money on their own.
Four focused initiatives, with Q4 accountability
Visser said there is more to say about the company’s operating plan and that a fuller operational review will come later. For now, he outlined the top line. Sonic is pushing ahead with four dedicated initiatives. Each has its own lead, goals, and OKRs, and revenue is the most important metric among them.
He said Sonic’s core capabilities are already in-house and have been all along: protocol engineering, payments and foreign-exchange operations, and agent infrastructure. The company is working with outside partners where it makes sense, including specialized infrastructure, crosschain liquidity, certain new features, and frontend work.
The letter is about strategy, he wrote, so he did not want to invent delivery dates just to fill space. What he did promise is a more specific format for the next update. In Q4, each of the four initiatives will come with a named owner, milestones, and the conditions under which Sonic will stop pursuing it. If something is not working, he said, the team would rather say so directly and move people to work that can succeed.
Technology still matters, but not as a vanity metric
One phrase often repeated inside Sonic, according to Visser, is that "nobody cares about tech." He said that is not quite right. People do care about technology, just not in the old framing familiar to many chains. Sonic may have battle-tested engineering and a stronger team, and that matters, but only when those strengths are packaged as a relevant solution rather than as a boast.
On raw throughput, he argued, there is no longer a meaningful gap. Several chains can now post numbers in roughly the same range. Benchmarking stopped being a moat a long time ago, he wrote, and the industry should stop pretending it still is one.
That is where performance actually becomes useful. It gives Sonic a chance to productize and deliver solutions that matter. Visser said the company needs to test concepts directly with users the way a traditional B2C company would, launching and measuring business units in the market. At the same time, it needs the right supporters, distribution channels, and go-to-market partners for B2B2C deals that can produce real scale and impact. Product-market fit, he wrote, is the mission, and it will not happen overnight.
Payments: frxUSD, native USDC, and consumer rails
Payments is one of the clearest verticals in that plan. Visser said performance differences remain visible there, and when paired with foreign-exchange capabilities, blockchain infrastructure can change cross-border payments with greater determinism and at a fraction of current cost and time.
He said Sonic has formed a working partnership with Frax and is using frxUSD as a white-labeled USSD product. The company is also working with Circle on native onchain USDC. On top of that, Sonic is considering Spendl as an on-ramp and is looking at support for Mastercard and consumer spending functionality. Visser described payments as an area where Sonic is moving aggressively, while noting that there are other conversations underway that he could not yet discuss. He invited anyone who felt overlooked to contact build@soniclabs.com.
AI: MCP servers, Priority Lanes, and the evolution of Spawn
Visser framed AI as more than a national-security theme and more than a web3-specific opportunity. What matters, he wrote, is the ability for agentic systems to carry out tasks and work toward user-defined goals. The interesting moment comes when a user can choose or shop for an agent template, fund the compute and spending resources it needs, and let it operate across web2, web3, and the physical world.
To support that, Sonic is internally testing a new network and client upgrade that includes built-in MCP servers and Priority Lanes, Sonic’s native transaction-priority system. Visser described both as foundation pieces for scaling AI agents and their goals to a much larger level.
He also said the Spawn project, which some early users may still associate with the broad label of "developer tools," has now split into two separate product lines:
- Spawn Studio: a place where protocols can apply to be included in the Sonic MCP server and receive support, and where developers can build privately or publish their own agent templates.
- Spawn Marketplace: a marketplace for non-technical users to browse existing templates, choose the most relevant one, confirm the agent’s task, fund it, and let it begin running.
Visser said Sonic built a list of critical AI infrastructure requirements and managed to include most of them in an upcoming release. Spawn Studio is where those capabilities are opened up to technical builders. Spawn Marketplace is where Sonic shares them with non-technical users and monetizes them alongside them.
Perpetuals and RWA: regulated access, not a new crypto primitive
Visser also laid out Sonic’s thinking on perpetual futures and real-world assets. He wrote that over the past year, dividend stocks have posted extraordinary price performance. Sonic wants to support 24/7 trading rather than a 9:30-to-16:00 session, near-instant finality rather than T+1 or T+3 settlement, and tighter spreads with better execution.
He said the company is not trying to reinvent some new crypto primitive. The goal is to make good on the promise of performance in a controlled, regulated, accessible way that traditional financial institutions can trust and benefit from. On onchain RWA, especially products tied to a "renewable" narrative, he said they are coming. Sonic wants regulated, KYC-gated access to succeed for those products in the same way that unrestricted, unregulated access was once promised to succeed.
Prediction markets and licensable infrastructure
Visser revisited the DeFi summer period to explain why it once felt so powerful. For a time, direct participants received direct returns, enough retail capital flowed in to sustain striking APYs, and the machine worked for founders and users alike — until it did not.
Today, he said, meme tokens and prediction markets carry a similar level of hype, but much of that energy is built on attention rather than durable foundations. Sonic has been building prediction-market infrastructure to improve existing platforms, and it has also been in discussions around licensing SonicVM and Sonic DB. He said both can be commercially licensed and can deliver direct improvements and meaningful cost savings to existing technology stacks.
Sonic is also building its own prediction market. Visser described it less as a mass-market consumer app and more as a demo for a B2B go-to-market path: Prediction Market as a Service. It is also a functional application layer that carries a little of the direct-participation appeal that defined DeFi, without trying to recreate DeFi itself. Monte Carlo simulation and live testing are underway.
He added that one internal product, tentatively called Yes/No, predates his time as CEO. He had started working on it before joining the company, initially on his own, and later brought it in as a native Sonic application because, in his view, it shows what the chain can do better than a letter can. The concept is hyper-local and highly social, with no white paper and no hype. Yes/No is now in closed beta on the Sonic testnet. Broader stress testing and registration details will come later.
Investors are asking different questions
A large share of Visser’s first 50 days at Sonic was spent in discussions with investors across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America. The most useful signal from those meetings, he wrote, was not the level of interest or support available. It was that the questions had changed.
Two years ago, the questions were about exchange listings and market makers. Today, they are about revenue lines, unit economics, regulatory posture, Sonic’s go-to-market plan, and distribution partners. Visser said this is a harder conversation, but a better one, and exactly the conversation Sonic wants to have.
Some of the talks involve long-cycle licensing relationships — strategic partnerships and capital that backstop the business rather than trade on narrative. He said a number of investors have already indicated a willingness to participate in Sonic’s next phase of growth on those terms. Some would run validator nodes and help secure the network. Others would bring distribution or market access in the verticals Sonic is targeting. For Sonic, he wrote, that is clearly better than a simple directional bet. The company is being careful about who it brings in and on what terms because balance-sheet composition is a strategic decision, not just a financing decision.
His broader point was straightforward: appetite is real, global, and dependent on execution. If Sonic ships products that generate revenue and reports honestly on the results, capital will follow.
Why tokenomics comes last, not first
Visser also addressed the role of the S token. The honest answer, he wrote, is that the token belongs at the end of the sequence, not the beginning. Buybacks, burns, fee sharing, and flywheel designs are not hard to sketch out, and they are easy to announce. What makes any of them real is revenue, because in the end each mechanism simply routes revenue somewhere.
Without revenue, he said, those systems are little more than treasury outflows dressed up as value accrual. The market has seen enough of that already to know how it usually ends.
That is why the letter contains no tokenomics announcement. Not because Sonic has not thought about it, but because announcing it now would produce exactly the kind of sugar-rush moment the letter argues against. The order, in his view, has to be: ship products, generate revenue, then decide how that revenue is routed. Once Sonic’s business units can point to revenue that exists, a mechanism to route part of it to S holders can be designed and made public. Until then, he asked the market to judge the company on the first two steps, because only those make the third an engineering problem instead of a marketing one.
Quarterly letters and open feedback
Visser closed by thanking Sonic’s engineering team and long-term supporters. He said the company is not there yet, but it can see the future it is working toward. He also asked readers to respond directly if any part of the strategy is wrong or needs adjustment.
Going forward, he said, these letters will be published once each quarter, with more detail over time. Sonic reads and processes every message sent to feedback@soniclabs.com.
The letter was signed: Matt Visser, CEO.