Sonic Labs CEO Matt Visser has laid out a sharp reset for the company and for how he thinks crypto businesses should operate, arguing that "DeFi Summer" is not coming back and that token design should follow revenue, not lead it.
In a public letter published on his 50th day in the job, Visser said the handover into the CEO role has taken longer than expected and is still under way, though it is now close to the finish line. He used the letter to make a broader point about the industry: crypto promised to transform financial services, but never truly delivered on that core claim. He wrote that the sector still runs pseudo-decentralized systems with centralized single points of failure, whether through off-chain operations or infrastructure without clear backups. He also said he has never been comfortable with anonymous teams, and that years of abuse of the phrase "code is law" have helped keep ordinary, non-crypto-native users out.
His conclusion was blunt. The world has changed, and the version of crypto summer the industry once knew "will never happen again." In his view, the market can no longer pretend that DeFi, or the broad promise of finance’s future, is still a story the world is willing to keep buying.
A market reset and a harder standard
Visser wrote that total crypto market capitalization has nearly been cut in half over the past year, with about $2 trillion in value wiped out. He said that value did not simply disappear but instead found "a better home." The remaining market is still meaningful in size, he added, but crypto companies need to grow up.
He contrasted that weakness with what he sees elsewhere in the economy. Even after the Iran war, he wrote, global rebalancing has gone unexpectedly well. China reduced imports, the United States increased some domestic exports, and the physical shortages once implied at the start of the war did not materialize in the way many feared. The S&P 500 has reached new highs again, while AI capital expenditure keeps rising. Crypto, by contrast, is still stumbling.
Visser pointed to Robinhood’s push with Robinhood Chain and said Polygon is turning into a payments company. Sonic, he said, has come to terms with a simple reality: if a product does not generate revenue, even the best technology in the world does not matter enough.
Aave’s proposed shutdown became a live example
To make the point concrete, Visser cited Aave’s proposal last week to shut down its Sonic deployment, along with deployments on five other chains and roughly 50 low-adoption assets across its markets. He said Aave founder Stani made clear that the move was not aimed at any specific L1 or L2, and added that he believed him because the logic behind the decision matches the message of the letter.
According to Visser, deposits tied to Sonic on Aave had dropped to about $7.6 million and were contributing less than $5,000 in quarterly revenue, not enough to cover maintenance costs. Against Aave’s $14 billion book, he wrote, the figure is so small it barely registers and does not affect Sonic’s core metrics in a meaningful way.
Even so, he did not brush it aside. Instead, he treated it as the clearest lesson now being put into practice at Sonic: integrations that exist for the announcement rather than for actual volume will be cut, and should be cut. The answer, he said, is not more integrations. It is products on Sonic’s own chain that can generate income.
Four focused initiatives, with Q4 accountability
Visser said there is much more to say about operations and that a fuller review will come later, but he outlined the strategic shape now. Sonic is working on four dedicated initiatives, each with its own lead, goals, and OKRs, with revenue sitting at the center of all of them.
He said the company’s core strengths are already in-house and have been all along: protocol engineering, payments and foreign exchange operations, and agent infrastructure. Those teams are staffed by seasoned technical operators, he wrote, so he does not need to search outside for that capability. Sonic is choosing to partner externally in narrower areas such as specialized infrastructure, cross-chain liquidity, specific new features, and front-end work.
He declined to publish delivery dates in the letter, saying he would not invent timelines just to fill space. What he did promise is a more concrete format for the next update: in Q4, each of the four projects will have a named owner, milestones, and explicit conditions under which Sonic would stop pursuing it. If something is not working, he said, the company would rather say so plainly and move people onto work with a better chance of succeeding.
Technology still matters, but not as a boast
One line frequently repeated inside Sonic, Visser wrote, is that "nobody cares about technology." His answer is more precise: people do care, just not in the way the crypto sector has been used to presenting it.
Being a top L1 blockchain with battle-tested technology and a stronger team does matter, he said, but only when those strengths are positioned as part of a relevant solution rather than as self-congratulation. On raw throughput, he argued, there is no longer a fundamental difference between chains. Several networks now post numbers in roughly the same range, and benchmark performance stopped being a moat a long time ago.
Performance, in his framing, matters because it gives Sonic the chance to package and deliver solutions that solve real problems. That means testing concepts directly with users in the way traditional B2C businesses do, then developing, shipping, and measuring each business unit. It also means finding the right supporters, distribution channels, and commercialization partners so those concepts can scale through B2B2C deals that bring real volume and real impact. Product-market fit, he wrote, is the mission, and it does not happen in a day.
Payments and FX
The first product line Visser discussed was payments. This is one area where he believes performance differences are still obvious. Paired with foreign exchange, he said, Sonic sees a chance to reshape cross-border payments with more certainty and at a fraction of current cost and time, creating a highly competitive vertical the company can enter.
Sonic has already established a relationship and business ties with Frax and plans to use frxUSD in white-label form as USSD, according to Visser. The company is also working with Circle on native on-chain USDC. It is considering Spendl as a fiat on-ramp and is looking at Mastercard support and consumer spending functions as well.
He described payments as an area the team is pushing hard, and added that there are more conversations just beginning that cannot yet be discussed publicly. If any relevant party feels they have been missed, he invited them to contact the company at [email protected].
AI, network upgrades, and Spawn’s split structure
The second major track is AI. Visser said the opportunity is larger than the national security frame that often surrounds it. The ability for agents to carry out tasks and solve for user-defined goals is not unique to web3, he wrote, but it is the starting point for some of the best ideas. In practice, that could mean letting users shop for agent templates, provision compute and spending resources, and then allow those agents to run across web2, web3, and the physical world.
Sonic is testing a new internal network and client upgrade that includes a built-in MCP server and Priority Lanes, described as Sonic’s native transaction prioritization system. Visser said these are the basic building blocks needed to let AI agents and their goals scale aggressively.
He also said Spawn, which some early users originally joined as a "developer tools" concept, has now evolved into two distinct product lines:
- Spawn Studio: a place where protocol teams can apply to be included in the Sonic MCP server and receive support, while developers can build privately or publish agent templates.
- Spawn Marketplace: a consumer-facing market where non-technical users can browse, select the most relevant existing templates, confirm the task for an agent, fund it, and set it running.
Visser said Sonic mapped a list of key AI infrastructure requirements and managed to include most of them in an upcoming release. Spawn Studio is where those capabilities are opened to technical builders; Spawn Marketplace is where they are shared with non-technical users and monetized together with them.
Perpetuals and RWA
The third product lane combines perpetuals and real-world assets. Visser wrote that over the past year, the pricing and performance of dividend stocks have been extraordinary. Sonic wants to support trading around the clock rather than only from 9:30 to 16:00, offer near-instant finality instead of T+1 or T+3 settlement, and deliver tighter spreads and better execution.
He said Sonic is not trying to invent a new crypto primitive. The goal is to apply existing technology use cases in a controlled, regulated, and accessible way so traditional financial institutions can trust the platform and benefit from the underlying tech.
On tokenized real-world assets, he said on-chain RWA products are coming, especially those tied to a "renewable" narrative. Sonic wants regulated, KYC-based access to those products to succeed in the way that unrestricted, unregulated access once promised but did not reliably deliver.
Prediction markets and licensable infrastructure
Visser’s section on prediction markets tied back to his broader argument about what made DeFi Summer feel different. At the time, he wrote, participants got direct benefits, enough retail capital poured in to support eye-catching APYs, and for a while the machine seemed to print for founders and users alike, until it stopped.
Today, he said, meme tokens and prediction markets show a similar level of hype, but much of that interest is built on attention rather than something durable underneath.
Sonic has been building prediction market infrastructure to enhance existing platforms, he wrote, and has also had discussions around licensing SonicVM and Sonic DB. Both are commercial products that can improve existing technology stacks directly and produce meaningful cost savings.
The company is also building its own prediction market. Visser described it less as a mass-market consumer product and more as a B2B go-to-market demo for "Prediction Market as a Service," while also serving as a functional application layer. Monte Carlo simulations and hands-on testing are under way, he said.
He added that he had been working on this before joining Sonic, at first on his own. Rather than treating it as a side project, he brought it in as a native Sonic application because it shows what the chain can do better than a letter can. The concept is for hyper-local, highly social markets, with no white paper and no hype. A closed beta of the project, tentatively named Yes/No, is already running on Sonic testnet. Wider stress testing and registration details will come later.
The investor conversation has changed
Visser said a large share of his first 50 days has been spent talking to 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, but the shift in the questions being asked.
Two years ago, the discussion was about exchange listings and market makers. Now, investors ask about revenue lines, unit economics, regulatory posture, Sonic’s go-to-market plan, and who its distribution partners are. Visser called that a harder conversation, but also a better one, and said it is exactly the conversation Sonic wants to have.
Some of the opportunities on the table are long-cycle licensing arrangements, along with strategic partners and capital meant to underwrite a business rather than trade a narrative. Several investors, he said, have already indicated a willingness to back Sonic’s next phase 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.
That setup is clearly better than a simple directional bet, he argued. Sonic is being selective about who comes onto the balance sheet and on what terms because balance sheet composition is a strategic decision, not just a financing one.
The appetite is real, he said. It is global. But it depends on whether Sonic can do what the letter says: ship products that generate revenue and report honestly on the outcome. "Capital follows execution."
What this means for token S
Visser answered one of the most obvious questions directly: where does token S fit into all of this? His answer was that it comes at the end of the sequence, not the beginning.
Buybacks, burns, fee sharing, and flywheel structures are not hard to design, he wrote, and all of them are easy to announce. What makes any of them real is revenue, because each mechanism is simply a way of routing revenue somewhere. Without revenue, they are just treasury funds moving out the door while being dressed up as value accrual, and the industry has seen enough of that to know how it ends.
That is why the letter contains no tokenomics announcement. Visser said it is not because the team has not thought about it, but because announcing it now would be exactly the kind of sugar rush the letter argues against. The order, in his words, is simple: deliver products, generate revenue, then decide how to route it. Once those business units are producing identifiable revenue, Sonic will design and publish the mechanism that directs it to S holders. Until then, he said, the company should be judged on the first two steps, because they are what turn the third from a marketing exercise into an engineering problem.
Visser closed by thanking Sonic’s technical team and long-time supporters in the community. He said these letters will be published quarterly from now on, with more detail over time, and invited direct feedback if any part of the strategy is wrong or needs adjustment. He added that the company reads and processes every message sent to [email protected].