- Sonic is expanding its reach with EVM compatibility.
- This move promises to attract Ethereum developers and strengthen the ecosystem.
- Although still in the early stages of testing, the project has already attracted significant interest.
Struggling with development complexity and scaling challenges, Web3 games have struggled to achieve the success many expected. Still, the industry continues to show signs of growth as development efforts continue unabated.
One project that is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this space is Sonic, a gaming-focused Layer-2 rollup built on Solana. Launched in March 2024 with the vision of providing new experiences and expanding the Solana gaming ecosystem, the company has taken a significant step toward that goal by announcing an EVM-compatible extension.
Solana’s Sonic, Ethereum Developers and Games Attracted
Sonic is delivering on its promise to bring more games to its users. In a press release on Thursday, July 11, the project announced that it will integrate Neon EVM, a solution built to support EVM dApps for the Solana project. According to Sonic CEO Chris Zu, this move will strengthen the ecosystem by attracting Ethereum developers and games that want to leverage Solana’s budding user base.
"Our effort to expand the Solana gaming ecosystem isn't limited to the SVM. With Neon Stack, we're able to onboard web3 games built on EVMs and bring them onto the Solana ecosystem. Solana has one of the most active and engaging user bases in the blockchain industry, and we're excited to enable EVM developers to be able to tap into this vibrant community via Sonic's L2," Zu asserted.
Sonic’s move to the EVM is an important step toward achieving our goal of building a virtual machine-independent framework that allows developers to focus on development without technical constraints, in addition to providing users with more games.
The project has attracted a lot of attention since the first day of its testnet launch, which has led to recent developments.
Solana’s Sonic, off to a good start
On June 19, Sonic’s testnet went live with a campaign called Sonic Odyssey, showing users what the network can do through quests and ecosystem games. Now, just over three weeks after its launch, the network has registered nearly 19 million wallet addresses and processed over 182 million transactions as of the time of writing, per the network explorer’s data. As the team highlighted, 3.2 million transactions were made in the first 36 hours since the network went live.
Sonic’s impressive numbers will likely provide reassurance to investors who have raised $16 million for the project in two funding rounds.
On the other side
- Sonic has not yet been released on mainnet.
- The network faces serious competition from industry leaders such as Immutable. polygonAnd Ronin.
Why this matters
Despite the recent buzz around Solana, Ethereum still has the upper hand in many aspects, including the size of its developer community. Sonic’s latest move promises to leverage Ethereum’s massive developer pool to benefit Solana users.
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