Sonic Labs has confirmed a major leadership overhaul, with Andre Cronje, Michael Kong, and David Richardson stepping down from the board and ending their involvement in company business decisions. The project has named Matt Visser as CEO and Kosta Kourkoumelis as COO as it tries to steady operations after pressure from weak token performance and strong community backlash.
New executives promise open decision-making
Known first for Fantom and later for its transition to the $S token, Sonic Labs has faced criticism over price weakness and dissatisfaction from its community. In its statement, the new management openly acknowledged the current “Hard Truths” and described this phase as “Day 1,” framing the reset around gradual progress rather than broad promises.
The company said future decisions, along with the reasoning behind them, will be made public. It also plans to create a dedicated risk and compliance committee to build internal controls. Sonic Labs added that retail holders of $S should be treated as real stakeholders, and said communication will shift away from vague announcements toward more concrete updates.
Development work continues as version 2.2.0 moves ahead
Sonic Labs also highlighted ongoing technical work in an effort to show continuity beyond the board changes. According to the announcement, since 2026 the project has merged 400 meaningful pull requests into its GitHub main branch and released 2 official versions. Its main release, version 2.2.0, is still in development and is already live on a private testnet.
That message was direct. While the leadership structure is changing, the engineering side has not stopped, and work on the Sonic network and related infrastructure is still underway.
Cronje says his role was technical, not commercial
After the company statement, Cronje published a personal clarification on June 19 explaining why he resigned from the board. He said the move was not an attempt to avoid accountability, but an effort to separate the work he handled from decisions he did not control.
According to Cronje, Fantom existed before he joined. He said he initially served as a technical adviser and was not appointed a director until December 2022. He also said that describing himself informally as a co-founder in the past was not precise. In his account, his actual role was as the main originator of the technical architecture, working with the team to build a functioning Fantom network and leading development of the Sonic network and Sonic Gateway.
He rejects claims tying him to migration and airdrop design
On the most disputed issues, Cronje drew a sharp line. He said he did not design or execute the FTM-to-S token migration, did not design or manage the Sonic airdrop, and had no involvement in token allocation, issuance, or inflation-related tokenomics decisions.
Cronje also said he did not support discontinuing ERC-20 FTM on Ethereum or shutting down the Opera network, adding that both should continue to receive support. Once the transition is complete, he said he will no longer take part in Sonic Labs business decisions and will focus on Flying Tulip, a new project he said he has been working on for the past 18 months.