Sonic's Milestone Funding Round

Sonic, a gaming-focused Solana Layer 2 network, raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Bitkraft Venture and with the participation of Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, and other prominent investors.

According to Chris Zhu, Sonic's founder and CEO, the funds raised bring Sonic's fully diluted token valuation to $100 million.

The funding campaign began in April and concluded earlier this month. The round was structured as equity with token warrants. As part of the deal, Bitkraft Ventures has joined Sonic's board. This Series A round increases Sonic's total funding to $16 million, following a previous $4 million seed round in 2022.

What is Sonic?

Sonic is a Solana Layer 2 network that focuses on enhancing the gaming experience. It is under development by Mirror World Labs (MWL), a legal entity of Sonic.

MWL has developed the HyperGrid Framework, a proprietary technology that enables horizontal scaling via rollups on Solana.

Sonic leverages this technology to offer a fast and cost-effective on-chain gaming experience powered by the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). Developers can seamlessly deploy decentralized applications (dApps) from Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains to Solana through HyperGrid's interpreter.

Principal at Bitkraft Ventures, Justin Swart, expressed high expectations for Sonic, stating, "I expect the Sonic SVM to become the go-to destination for any gaming studio that wants to build games within the Solana ecosystem."

The Evolution of Sonic

Initially, Sonic began as a mobile game. However, the project soon realized the need for gaming infrastructure on the Solana network. Traditional applications like games found it challenging to internalize value on a shared Solana layer not designed for single applications.

Specific applications often require custom features such as privacy, instant settlements, asset transfer rules, and compliance, which were not supported by the existing infrastructure.

The original Sonic game still exists and serves as a demo for technical documentation. Additionally, the project has developed a decentralized application called World Store, an asset aggregator designed to assist game studios in distributing and settling assets. The Layer 2 network remains Sonic's primary tool to increase gaming adoption on Solana.

"The Sonic game still exists and is used as a demo for technical documentation," said Zhu, highlighting the project's ongoing commitment to improving gaming infrastructure.

Sonic's Competitors and Future Plans

Sonic's main competitor is Eclipse, building an SVM Layer 2 on Ethereum. Other competitors include Ronin Chain and Redstone Network. Despite the competition, Sonic is currently on devnet, with five gaming studios already building with its technology.

An incentivized testnet campaign called Odyssey is set to launch later this week. This campaign will allow users to send transactions, play games launching on Sonic, and earn "rings" for their on-chain activities. These rings are points that will not be directly converted into Sonic's token, but contributors will be rewarded in some way.

Sonic's mainnet and its token are expected to launch in the third quarter of this year. To achieve this, Sonic plans to expand its core developer team, developer and game relations team, and marketing team. The current headcount is 20 people, with the core team based in New York.

Sonic also offers grants and acceleration programs to onboard game developers onto its platform. The grants program, valued at $20 million, consists of a mix of token grants, token swap deals, and stablecoins or fiat.