The Fantom Foundation, the team supporting the development of the Fantom blockchain, today announced the launch of the testnet environment for Fantom Sonic (“Sonic”). Designed for speed, scale, and cost-efficiency, Fantom Sonic provides increased benefits to the network including:

• Transaction capability increases by over 65x to be able to achieve an anticipated 2,000 transactions per second
• Time-to-finality execution in less than one second (~0.98s)
• Reduction in storage size for all node types from approximately 11 TB to under 1 TB
• Decrease node deployment time from multiple weeks to roughly two days
• Live-pruning for validators which reduces storage by approximately 86%
  

Sonic puts Fantom’s transactional capabilities on par with the heavy throughput of institutional players like major credit card companies, international banks, and enterprise institutions. The reduction in operational costs, and decrease of staking requirements to 50,000 FTM, decreases the barrier to entry to operate a cost-effective validator and makes it more accessible to participate in securing the network.

The testnet environment runs until the Sonic mainnet is anticipated to deploy in the spring of 2024. Developers can bring their projects to the testnet to experience the virtual machine updates and enhanced capabilities Sonic brings to the Fantom ecosystem. Additional updates are expected to come to the testnet environment in December 2023.

Developers and users alike can check out the Sonic showcase environment at sonic.fantom.network and interact with the public testnet environment at public-sonic.fantom.network