What is Sophon (SOPH)?

What is Sophon?

(Source: sophon)

Sophon is based on Validium, integrated with the ZK Stack, and aligned with the vision of Elastic Chain, making it a powerful platform that eliminates various barriers for both users and developers, providing scalability, interoperability, and an outstanding on-chain experience. Sophon completely redefines the on-chain experience of zero-knowledge proof chains, featuring real applications, convenient user experiences, and high scalability.

Past Crypto applications mostly focused too much on engineering thinking, which included difficult interfaces, complex logic, and extremely high barriers to entry. Most people couldn't even understand what was being done. However, Sophon no longer emphasizes the infrastructure itself, but rather focuses on making on-chain interactions more like Web2, just as smooth and intuitive. Its starting point is simple yet powerful, hiding ZK technology at the bottom layer, allowing users to only experience a smooth interaction. It also addresses the issue of fragmented liquidity between chains, enabling assets and applications to connect seamlessly like flowing water, maximizing the performance of Validium, and supporting truly millions of users on-chain simultaneously.

Technical Highlights of Sophon

Validium-based ZK scaling solution

Sophon uses the Validium model in conjunction with Avail as the data availability layer to achieve:

• Zero-Knowledge Security Guarantee (ZK Validity Proof)
• Low cost, large-scale user support
• Stronger privacy and performance efficiency (transactions not fully written to L1)

The biggest difference with Rollup: Validium's data is off-chain, offering significantly better performance and cost, while still maintaining Layer 1 level security.

Elastic Chain: No more island isolation on the chain.

Sophon is a chain in Elastic Chain, and this network enables all ZK chains (whether Rollup or Validium) to interoperate with each other. This means:

• Assets, information, and applications can interact instantly across chains.
• The user experience feels as smooth as sliding applications on a chain.
• No more need for back-and-forth bridging, experience as natural as Web2.

Elastic Chain combines:

• ZK Router: Manage transaction flow and verification
• ZK Gateway: The bridge between chains
• ZK Chains: Layer 2 chains like Sophon

Ultimate user experience and flexible scalability

Sophon achieves on-chain applications with a Web2 experience through the following points.

• Scalability: Elastic Chain can automatically adjust block space based on usage, avoiding congestion and high gas.
• Composable: dApps on Sophon can seamlessly integrate with applications across the entire ZKsync ecosystem.
• Design is for consumers: no longer just trading and speculating on coins, but moving towards a more interactive on-chain lifestyle.

Sophon's token economics

The native token SOPH of Sophon has a fixed total supply of 10 billion coins, and its distribution design emphasizes long-term construction orientation and community introduction. The official distribution divides the tokens into seven core allocation categories, as follows:

1. The ecosystem reserve accounts for the largest proportion, reaching 26%.
   This portion of resources is specifically allocated to promote future dApp developers, partners, community activities, and protocol expansion, etc. To ensure flexibility in early development, 42% of this portion will be unlocked at the TGE (Token Generation Event), while the remaining 58% will be linearly unlocked over 5 years to ensure long-term stable support.

2. Core Contributors, allocation ratio is 25%
   This part mainly rewards the early development team and builders, with a 12-month lock-up period, followed by a 3-year linear unlocking, ensuring the long-term interests of the team and the network are aligned.

3. Node Rewards allocation 20%
   As the core mechanism for incentivizing network operators, the node rewards accumulated before the TGE will be unlocked 3 months after the TGE; the weekly node rewards after the TGE will also have a 3-month lock-up period starting from that week, followed by a 7-day linear release. This design helps to ensure the integrity and stability of node operations.

4. Seed Investors receive 18% of the token allocation.
   To avoid early funding pressure causing market fluctuations, this portion has a 12-month lock-up period and will be unlocked linearly over the following 2 years.

5. To stimulate early user participation, Sophon has set up an Initial Airdrop, allocating a total of 9%.
   This part will be fully unlocked and distributed at TGE, effectively expanding the early community foundation.

6. Post Mainnet Liquidity Mining has a 2% allocation after the mainnet launch.
   This portion of the tokens will unlock the lock-up period after 6 months and will be released linearly over the next six months to incentivize early liquidity providers to participate in the SOPH on-chain asset ecosystem.

(Source: docs.sophon)

This SOPH allocation strategy balances developer incentives, community participation, infrastructure development, and market stability, laying a solid foundation for the long-term sustainable development of Sophon. Overall, about 57% of the tokens will ultimately flow back to the community and node participants, reflecting the high alignment of SOPH with the open governance spirit of Web3.

Sophon's Future Outlook

As the ZKsync Elastic Chain continues to expand, Sophon will play a key role in bridging infrastructure and end-user experience. This is a movement that transforms Crypto from a financial tool into a digital lifestyle medium, and the SOPH token along with the entire network is the engine of this transformation.

Start trading SOPH spot immediately:https://www.gate.com/trade/SOPH_USDT

Summary

Sophon is not just a technology stack, but a redefinition aimed at user experience + application implementation. While other public chains are still competing on TPS and TVL, Sophon directly challenges who can become the consumer-grade crypto platform.