The last time icon (ICX) makes titles, it is At the height of the ICO bubble When it competes with Tron and Filecoin to buy BitTorrent in a high-profile bidding war.
The icon, previously revealed as “Korean Ethereum,” sank early in 2018 but eventually struggles to maintain the relationship between the fierce competition and a changing narrative.
Today, the icon is back to the news, as it is recently announced that it has rebranded to sodax and has moved the entire defi infrastructure from its own layer-1 blockchain to Sonic, an EVM-dedicated network dedicated to high-speed, cheap transactions.
Sonic itself is a product of a rebrand, The shift from the name fantom in 2024.
In an interview with CoinDesk, icon founder Min Kim explained the logic behind the shift from running an independent blockchain to effectively outsource the operation part of the Layer-1 Sonic infrastructure.
“Back in 2017, we had to build our own Layer-1 because there was no other infrastructure available,” Kim said. “Now, buying and maintaining your own Layer-1 property is no longer reasonable because there are cheaper, better options available.”
According to Kim, the outsource infrastructure in Sonic gives her team to streamlide costs and sharpen their strategic focus on the defi products.
“It significantly cuts our costs of operating millions of dollars,” Kim told CoinDesk. “There is less inflation for our tokens, and all of them are financially understanding.”
This is not all that is not the same from the world of manufacturing. Foxconn and Taiwan Semiconductor are billions of dollars companies because companies like Apple and Nvidia do not have their own factories.
Similarly, the icon does not have to bring highly fixed costs and risks associated with the operation of an entire blockchain.
“Maintaining a decentralized network with validators around the world is a huge task,” Kim explained. “We have an eight-year experience that runs our own layer-1. It’s tedious, expensive, and very stressful. Outsourcing Sonic allows us to focus on changing and serving products that people really like.”
Kim also featured risk reduction benefits, noting that the defi layer of the icon may remain unaffected by Sonic infrastructure issues, creating an important risk of risk.
“There’s a risking,” he explained. “If Sonic is hacked, it’s obviously bad, but it’s not a direct fault.
The approach comes as the icon aims to recreate itself in the midst of reduced influence on the market. When a top 20 cryptocurrency, the icon token crashed nearly 99% from all time highs in late 2018, and since never recovered, According to coingecko dataWhile investors move toward platforms that better achieve the increase of Defi and NFT.
“Layer-1 infrastructure does not make sense for most projects,” Kim argued. “There are many underestimated efforts, capital costs involved. There was a delusion that investors placed on Layer-1 projects, thinking of an ecosystem that will naturally build itself. But that is expensive and rarely maintained.”
Today has been rebranded as sodax and dedicated to cross-chain liquid products, the project is moving ICX tokens to a new token, soda. While Sonic and Sodax tokens remain unique, Kim emphasized that Sonic monetization fee mechanisms will return transaction fees back to soda holders.
“Sonic allows 90% of transaction fees to return to soda token holders,” said Kim, emphasizing the economic incentive of their strategic pivot.
Asked if this outsourcing model represents a broader trend, Kim predicted that many projects that currently running Layer-1 are likely to reconsider as a shift of cycles on the market.
“Ethereum and Solana are great examples because they are fully focused on validators and network security,” he said. “We are ahead of the return to the launch of launching your own layer-1s. It will not only live for most long-term projects.”
As the period of premium values for the Proprietary Layer-1 platforms ended, more projects, Kim said, will only focus on the product and not the infrastructure with icon-now sodax-predecessor in its way.
“We will go back to the basics, lower our costs, operational operations, and doubling what we originally wanted to do: put financial products in people’s hands.”
