Sonic, A Solana brush
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The gaming-focused Layer 2 network has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round. Sonic said Tuesday that Bitkraft Ventures led the round, with participation from Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings and others.
The project began raising funding in April and closed earlier this month, Sonic founder and CEO Chris Zhu told The Block. Zhu said the round consisted of shares with token warrants, bringing Sonic’s fully diluted valuation to $100 million.
As part of the deal, Bitkraft joined Sonic’s board of directors. The Series A round brings Sonic’s total funding to $16 million, having previously raised $4 million in a 2022 seed round.
What is Sonic?
Sonic is a gaming-focused Solana Layer 2 network being developed by Mirror World Labs, a Sonic corporation. MWL has built a proprietary technology called the HyperGrid Framework that enables horizontal scaling through Solana’s rollups, and Sonic is being built using this technology.
“Based on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), Sonic delivers a lightning-fast on-chain gaming experience at minimal cost,” Zhu said, allowing developers to “seamlessly deploy decentralized applications (dApps). Ethereum 
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Virtual machines (EVMs) connect to Solana through HyperGrid’s interpreter.”
Justin Swart, head of Bitkraft Ventures, said in a statement that he expects Sonic SVM to become “the destination for all game studios looking to build games within the Solana ecosystem.”
Zhu said that Sonic itself started out as a mobile game first, adding that as the project progressed, they realized the gaming infrastructure was lacking. For example, applications like games find it difficult to internalize value from a shared Solana layer that was not designed with just one application in mind, Zhu said. He added that specific applications may require custom features such as privacy, instant payments, asset transfer rules and compliance that are not supported.
The Sonic game still exists and is used as a demo for technical documentation, Zhu said. The project has also built a decentralized application called World Store, an asset aggregator designed to support game studios’ asset distribution and settlement. The layer 2 network is Sonic’s final tool to increase gaming adoption on Solana, Zhu said.
Sonic’s closest competitor is Eclipse, but it is building SVM Layer 2 on Ethereum, according to Zhu. He added that Ronin Chain and Redstone Network could also be considered Sonic’s competitors.
Sonic Mainnet and Token Launch
Zhu said Sonic is currently participating in the devnet, with the first set of five game studios building the technology. Zhu said an incentivized testnet campaign called “Odyssey” is scheduled to launch later this week, which will allow users to send transactions, play games released on Sonic, and earn “rings” for on-chain activity. He added that rings are like points and won’t directly convert into Sonic tokens, but contributors will be rewarded in some way.
Zhu said Sonic’s mainnet and its own token are expected to launch in the third quarter of this year.
To that end, Sonic plans to expand globally by expanding its core developer team, developer and game relations team, and marketing team, Zhu said. Sonic currently has 20 employees, with the core team located in New York.
Sonic also has grant and acceleration programs to onboard game developers to its platform. The grant program is worth $20 million and consists of a mix of token grants, token swap transactions, and stablecoins or fiat, Zhu said.
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