Sonic. Points program

Useful links:

• Sonic Docs
• Points dashboard

📌 Today I will analyze the point program from Sonic, and also try to understand where it is most profitable to farm points.

Sonic is the upgraded version of the Fantom blockchain, developed by the well-known crypto founder Andre Cronje. The rebranding was completed on January 16, 2025, including the change of the main ticker to $S. The upgraded blockchain offers:

• Processing up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), compared to 30 TPS in the previous version (Fantom).
• Transaction finality in less than 1 second.
• Average transaction cost of less than $0.01.
• Full EVM compatibility, allowing developers to easily migrate dApps and smart contracts from the Ethereum ecosystem.
• 90% gas fee rebates for developers as an incentive to grow the ecosystem

Tokenomics

• Total supply: 3,175M $S. At a price of $0.50, FDV = $1,857M.
• All tokens are already in circulation, meaning there is no sell pressure from early investors, the team, or other allocations.

However, the supply will increase for specific ecosystem initiatives:

• +6% (190.5M $S) for Season 1 airdrop.
• +1.5% (47.625M $S) annually for 6 years to incentivize ecosystem growth (+9% total over 6 years). If any tokens remain unused after 1 year, they will permanently burn and be removed from the supply.
• +1.75% (55.5M $S) annually starting from year 5 for validator rewards (rewards for the first 4 years are already reserved in the current total supply).

Season 1 Farming

• Season 1 point farming began in late February and will end in June 2025.
• ~190.5M $S will be distributed (~$100M at $0.50 per token).
• Only 25% of the tokens will be claimable at TGE.
• The remaining 75% will be vested over 270 days, with linear unlocks and gradual claims.
• Early vesting withdrawals (beyond scheduled unlocks) will result in a partial burn, permanently removing tokens from the supply.

More details on vesting can be found here.

Airdrop for the First Season will be distributed for points (2 categories) and gems.
- 62.5% of tokens will be allocated to points, i.e. 119m$S
- 37.5% of tokens will be allocated to gems, i.e. 71.5m$S

They are farmed simply by holding Whitelist assets in your wallet. Depending on the token, different boosts apply. These boosts are designed to ensure a balanced inflow of assets into the network and may be adjusted after 3 months.

Please note that some assets (highlighted in red) farm only Activity Points and do NOT farm Passive Points.

They are farmed by allocating Whitelist assets in approved DApps.

Activity Points also have a 2x multiplier on farming, in addition to the one specified for Passive Points.

And here’s another table with all Activity Points and Passive Points.

Point Price Calculation

According to DefiLlama, the current TVL of Sonic is $813M. However, there are multiple Twitter threads suggesting that the real TVL is closer to $1.2B.

On the Leaderboard page, we only have data for the Top-100 participants. On average, they farm 5.6B points per day, and as of March 18, 2025, they have collectively farmed 168.2B points. By June 30, 2025 (in 105 days, the estimated end of the campaign), the total will reach 755B points.

Now, let’s assume:

• Average TVL doubles
• Participants outside the Top-100 farm as many points as the Top-100

This means the total points farmed will 4x by the end of Season 1, reaching approximately 3T (trillion) points.
In other words, 1 $S will be earned for every 42K points.

Conservative Example:

If you allocate $1K into Silo, you'll earn Active Points with a 10x multiplier.
This means you will farm:

• 10K points per day
• 105K points by the end of the campaign

Converted into $S tokens, this will be:

• 25 $S tokens (~$12.5 at a $0.50 price)
• ~5% APY from points farming

Yields can be further maximized through advanced farming strategies like looping, Pendle, and others.

This portion of the airdrop is primarily aimed at rewarding developers.

A part of the Season 1 airdrop will be allocated to ecosystem applications. Users will first earn Gems within Dapps, and later, these Dapps will exchange them for $S tokens.

The concept is similar to Blast, where users farmed Gold within applications, and later, tokens were distributed among participants.

Each Dapp independently determines:

• How to distribute Gems
• What activities qualify for Gems
• How to account for Gems

Additionally, at TGE, each Dapp will receive its allocated tokens fully unlocked and will have the autonomy to decide how and when to distribute them. Theoretically, a Dapp could retain all tokens, but, as seen in Blast, projects are likely to share them with the community.

Gems Distribution

A total of 1,680,000 Gems has been allocated, of which:

• 262,500 Gems have already been assigned and will be distributed to winners of the Sonic Boom developer campaign for early and high-value applications.
• The remaining 1,417,500 Gems are still available for distribution in Season 1.

Important Notes:

• Gems represent 37.5% of the airdrop.
• The total supply is capped at 1.68M Gems.
• 1 Gem is valued at approximately 42.5 $S tokens based on the airdrop allocation.

Sonic Boom

This now-completed campaign provides insights into which Dapps already have Gems and, all else being equal, are more promising for farming.

During Sonic Boom, Gems were allocated based on the Dapp category:

Emerald Tier:

• Silo, Gravity Finance, Vicuna Finance, MarginZero, Yearn, Plus.bet, Sonic Market, Rings, XPress, Soneta

Sapphire Tier:

• Shadow Exchange, RabbitX, Vertex, Magpie, Metropolis, Equalizer, SwapX, Stable Jack, Beethoven X, CrossCurve

Ruby Tier:

• SuperSonic, Avalon, Degen Express, Stability, Stryke, Lever by ZeroLend, Sacra, Estfor Kingdom, MachFi, Lynx

The remaining 1,417,500 Gems will be distributed based on the contribution and significance of each Dapp. It’s important to note that there is no final list of Dapps that will receive a Gems allocation, but it is almost certain that Sonic Boom participants will continue to be involved.

The evaluation of each project's contribution follows a formula consisting of several key factors:

1. Gem Score = Category Weight × Sonic Native Weight

2. Points score:
Point Score=Total Sonic Points Generated / Sonic Points Generated By App​

3. Final Score:
Final Score = Gem Score × (1+Point Score)

4. Share of Gems
Share of Sonic Gems = Total Final ScoreApp / Final Score​ × Total Gems

Insights

1. The most important factor is to focus on Gem Score and its components.
• Gem Score has the biggest impact on the Final Score.
• Points Score is not as crucial, as its impact ranges from x1 to x2.
• However, an x2 boost is unrealistic, as it would require one protocol to farm all the points in the ecosystem—which is not happening.
• In reality, there are already nearly 100 Dapps, so the actual Points Score boost for top protocols will likely be around x1.1 to x1.2.
2. A small project and a large project can have the same Gem Score.
• Example: Silo Finance and Plus.bet have Gem Scores that are equal, even though their TVL differs by tens of times.
• Because Gems are distributed based on Gem Score, both projects will receive the same number of Gems.
• However, since Silo has significantly more users, each individual participant in Silo will receive far fewer Gems compared to Plus.bet users.
• This pattern has already been observed in Sonic Boom, where all projects within the same category received the same number of Gems, regardless of TVL size or other factors.

I have calculated Gem Scores for all Emerald winners of Sonic Boom and have also included a few additional projects:

Interim Takeaways

• Using the official bridge looks promising.
• It's still unclear whether the official bridge counts as a separate Dapp, but if you’re bridging funds, it's best to use it.
• Other bridges like Stargate, Rhino.fi, etc. will have a Native weight of 0.5, meaning their Total weight will be 2.5.
• Abusing the official bridge isn’t recommended either, as its TVL is already too high.
• Pert / Dpot DEXs, Derivatives, and GameFi protocols
• These will likely reward active trading, artificial volume generation, etc.
• Therefore, these protocols are mainly for advanced users or those with hedging strategies.
• Major protocols with high TVL
• Well-known and reliable protocols like Silo Finance and Rings are safe choices, but due to high TVL, the share of Gems you’ll receive will be lower.
• However, placing funds in Silo or Rings is still a reasonable strategy, considering their native yield opportunities.
• Finding protocols with low TVL but high Total weight
• One of the most promising options appears to be MachFi (a lending protocol exclusive to Sonic).
• Since it operates only on Sonic, it has an almost maximum Total weight while keeping TVL low.
• A solid strategy could be supplying stablecoins, ETH, BTC, and optionally using looping strategies.
• Borrowing assets earns twice as many internal MachFi points, meaning the $S airdrop will be distributed accordingly.

Conclusion

• My approach may differ from mainstream strategies, but when farming Sonic, the focus should be on Gems.
• Maximizing farming points won’t be very profitable due to the massive TVL, yielding only ~5-10% APR in $S tokens at best.
• Moderate-risk Gem farming strategy → MachFi.
• More conservative options → Rings and Silo Finance.