Sonic V1 Is Out! Swapping Tokens and Earning Fees as a Liquidity Provider Now Available on the Internet Computer 🚀

Sonic is now live on the Internet Computer — start swapping ICP, Wrapped ICP (WICP), and Cycles Token (XTC) without any gas fees today!

Sonic
6 min readJan 21, 2022

After months of hard work, we’re excited to announce that Sonic V1 goes live on the Internet Computer today! 🥳

For users, this means that you can now access the Sonic App where you’ll be able to swap your tokens and earn fees as a liquidity provider. For developers, our canister and Swap & Liquidity API is now available!

Sonic V1 comes with:

  • Swaps for ICP / WICP, ICP / XTC, & WICP / XTC
  • Liquidity pool for WICP / XTC

It’s time to get excited, we are opening the floodgates to composable DeFi on the IC… right now! 🔥

Swaps On The IC: A Reminder 🔁

What is Sonic? An open internet service that offers a suite of DeFi products for the Internet Computer blockchain.

How does Sonic work? Sonic operates on a gasless Automated Market Maker (AMM). Users can add new tokens, create new swap pairings, and earn fees by providing liquidity to pools. Barring enough liquidity, traders can swap their tokens using the previously created swap pairings. Thanks to the Internet Computer, all transactions are gasless, the only fees being those paid to liquidity providers.

Why do we need Sonic? To create a win-win situation between people with extra liquidity and people looking to swap tokens that might otherwise have low liquidity on regular exchanges.

V1 Features 🧳

For the launch of Sonic, we’ve focused mainly on the core features of a permissionless DeFi platform, with a few novel tweaks thanks to the architecture of the Internet Computer.

Adding Tokens & Pairings

The Sonic app comes with a fixed set of assets; ICP, Wrapped ICP (WICP), and Cycles Token (XTC).

This fixed set is only temporary — Sonic will always be community-led, users are encouraged to import any token on the Internet Computer that follows the DIP20 token standard. Once imported, the token will be accessible to anyone & everyone who interacts with Sonic.

To start, token additions will be handled by the Sonic team. This is not an effort to gatekeep, but rather to vet for malicious tokens until we have an automated system in place to do so.

Token imports will also leverage DAB’s Token Registry. We felt this was an important move to make from our launch so that we can be positioned to add more fungible token standards in the future through the use of DAB’s standard-agnostic wrappers.

In the future, we plan to display a tokens ‘verified’ status for tokens who are added to DAB and have their code verified through Cover. This will improve the transparency of tokens on Sonic, and as a result, the safety of the users who interact with them.

Swaps

Most importantly, V1 of Sonic brings gasless token swaps to the IC.

Yes, you heard that right. The reverse gas model of the Internet Computer allows Sonic to offer gas-free swaps. The only fees that you’ll pay is the 0.3% swap fee that is split up among the users providing the liquidity, and the transaction fees for the underlying update calls.

Update calls on canisters of tokens like XTC are 0.002 XTC or ~$0.003 per call.

For a full tutorial on how to make swaps from the Sonic app, visit the Swaps section of our docs.

Liquidity Pools

Sonic V1 will have gasless additions and removals of liquidity from Sonic liquidity pools!

Similar to other popular AMM services, when a user provides some of their assets as liquidity into a Sonic liquidity pool, they earn fees proportional to their share of the pool’s total revenue.

Interested in earning fees for providing liquidity? Deposit your WIPC and XTC into the WICP / XTC liquidity pool — it’s available right now!

Learn more about Sonic Liquidity pools from the Liquidity Pools section of our docs.

Building With Sonic 👷‍♂️

For everyday users to interact with our swaps and liquidity we’ve got the Sonic app, for developers we have the Sonic API. Everything in Sonic will procedurally be made open source in the coming weeks (to ensure we can gather feedback from this V1 release!).

Swaps & Liquidity API

Are you a project looking to add your token, create a swap pair, and add liquidity from your treasury? Are you a game that wants to earn a yield on the deposits that are staked by your users? All of this is at your fingertips with the Sonic API.

To learn more, our documentation has a developer section that you’ll find helpful!

Sonic V2 and Beyond 📡

We aren’t stopping at swaps and liquidity pools though!

Here are some of the highlight features that we’ve got coming down the feature pipeline next:

  • Token Launchpad (V2!)
  • DAO Tools / Structure
  • $SONIC Token

Token Launchpad 🚀

In the near future, you’ll be able to create and configure your own custom DIP20 token through Sonic’s Token Launchpad canister. This is the main feature coming in V2.

Sonic’s launchpad aims to help teams deliver more transparent token launches and distributions.

Tokens issued through Sonic will also be automatically imported to Sonic, making it super easy for teams to programmatically guarantee that public sale proceeds will end up being used to own the liquidity of their own token.

DAO Tools / Structure ⛩

Our next large milestone after V2 will be going from Sonic → Sonic DAO by implementing a new DAO structure & tools to boot.

By leveraging the SNS or own custom DAO implementation, we will be able to abstract away the current centralization of token additions & vetting, protocol level feature proposals, funding for builders on the platform, and more.

This transition is key in our mission to decentralize the Sonic protocol. And (as I’m sure you’ve all been waiting to hear about 😉) we are going to need a $SONIC token to do so…

$SONIC Token ⏩

Airdrop winners, future whales, early liquidity providers, and future yield farmers… this one is for you! 🦇🔉

Once we have the Token Launchpad & DAO Structure both in a solid place, the natural next extension is to return value & governance rights of the protocol back to the community who were responsible for helping us drive the growth of Sonic.

So, how will I be able to get my hands on some $SONIC? 🤔

Great question! Before we get to that, let’s dive into our planned token distribution so that we can be transparent with our intended community token allocation.

  • 5% Public Sale
  • 20% Team (vested monthly for four years)
  • 75% Community (Airdrops, Ecosystem Fund, Liquidity Incentives, Treasury)

We plan on reserving a war chest full of $SONIC (75% of all tokens) specifically for community members who help to drive growth. This could come in the form of adding liquidity early, being an active member of the Sonic protocol community or engaging in the development of our open-source code.

We really want to hit home that Sonic is the community’s platform first and foremost. We will be capturing all early platform activity through CAP, keeping careful records of community members who help us drive growth, and will do retrospective token allocation to early participants that fit into either camp when we launch the $SONIC governance token. We are a DeFi protocol for the people, driven by the people!

Wrapping it up.

That’s it for today. Remember that this is V1 and does not include the full feature set that we envision for Sonic. However, we’re super proud to be bringing DeFi to the Internet Computer through Swaps & Liquidity Pools.

If you’ve got any questions about Sonic, connect with us on Twitter or hop into our Discord to jam! See you there 👋

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