Hey folks, so if you’re unfamiliar with Sonic, Sonic is basically a re-development from the Fantom network ($FTM), which boasts some crazy transaction speeds (10,000/s) and crazy-low transaction costs:
For you farmers out there, one of the exciting parts of Sonic is it’s $S token, which according to its website will be dropped to its users at the tune of more than $131 million dollars:
In today’s article, I’m going to be breaking down some of the key ways that are currently available to get your share of $S once it gets released.
The Road to Sonic:
Perhaps the most time sensitive of any of the tasks I’ll outline, Galxe has a quest called Road to Sonic which ends in about a day, a series of tasks that once completed will award you with 6 different shard NFTs — all of which at the end of the 6 week period (Approximately 13:00 UTC October 14th), can be combined into a single NFT.
If you’re reading this at the midnight hour, there are some tips that I can give you that will speed up the process:
Bridge roughly $250-$300 dollars instead of $50:
The very first task from Week 1 is to “Wormhole Bridge minimum $50 USDC from Ethereum to Fantom.” I know, I hate Wormhole just as much as you do, especially when you have to wait 24 minutes just to bridge over:
But just as it reads, you only need to bridge $50 in order to complete the task, however if you currently have no funds on Fantom, I recommend bridging around $250-$300 dollars in order to comfortably complete other tasks for later weeks the most expensive including:
Holding 200 $sFTMx (Week 1 asks you hold 100, but Week 2 asks you hold 150, and then Week 3 200 $sFTMx), which is roughly worth $160)
Deposit $50 USD worth of wFTM/EQUAL
Add at least $100 to the USDC.e/sFTMx pool
There are also a series of other tasks that require significantly smaller amounts of capital including:
- Trade 30 FTM or more in value on the Degen Express platform (~$21)
- Have a veEQUAL lock greater than 1 veEQUAL in your address (~$13)
- Hold an maBeets position with at least $10
- Create or accept an offer with at least 20 wFTM on Debita (~$14)
- Lend (Deposit) or Borrow 20 FTM on Polter Finance (~$14)
As you can tell from the list above, most of these don’t really require you to lose any funds, and in fact, I notice that several times in my Rabby wallet that Sonic actually will cover your transaction fees:
These do not include fees that are required of possible charges that might be incurred to complete the Estfor Kingdom tasks, which I’ll get into next…
Estfor Kingdom Tasks
Estfor Kingdom is the most popular play-to-earn game on the Fantom network, which consist of a few different tasks spread across different Road to Sonic weeks. The ones notable are…
Complete 2 Quests — The Longest Task: The longest task (at least for me) that it took to complete were for the completion of two quests on Estfor Kingdom. The first quest took roughly an hour, but the second one — Nymph Watch, which took almost 8 hours because I had the sh!ttiest axe that only allowed to only accrue 120 logs/hour, when I needed 1000.
I haven’t played the game long enough to know whether or not the same quests pop-up for everyone, but hopefully it doesn’t take you as long as it did for me.
Joining a clan — the Most Expensive Task: With the exception of the veEQUAL task which requires a lock up of $EQUAL, all of the tasks that require capital are non-committal, meaning that you can trade in-and-out of the positions as soon as you get the task approved through Galxe. The one possible exception is Estor’s Clan task, which requires you to either create a join a clan.
If you’re able to get a clan to let you in for free through their Discord clan-recruit channel, then congratulations for you were far luckier than I was. Skeptical that someone was going to take the time to recruit a n00b player such as myself, I went for the much simpler alternative which was to create my own clan, which you can do so for 100 $BRUSH (~$2.50).
(If you’re in need of a clan, I have two spots in my ‘MWC’ clan. Just make a request to join and DM me on X (https://x.com/CryptosWith) to poke me to accept it)
I’m too late for the Shards, is there anything else I can do?
If you don’t have enough time or missed out on the Road to Sonic deadline, there are a few other ways that you can participate in order to get your share of $S.
Sonic Arcade
Just as it sounds, Sonic has a set of arcade games which you can play every day in order to earn arcade points:
First you need to use request $TOKEN tokens which can then be spent on playing each game 20 times per day, or a total of 60 times across 3 different games.
Tip: Just like any casino game, the bigger the gains the more the risk of losing, and considering you really can’t up your bet, the best strategy I found is simply to go for the lowest risk settings — that way you can at least ensure that you’ll win roughly 50–75 arcade points a day.
Use the actual testnet
The Sonic Arcade just gives the user some exposure, but you can also actually use the testnet itself through different DeFi functions. By going to the faucet page: https://testnet.soniclabs.com/account you can claim up to 50 testnet tokens per day:
Here on the same page, you can try swapping $CORAL testnet tokens for $DIAMOND testnet tokens.
As far as dapps go, the only one that I’ve seen have it integrated is on Dmail, a cryptographic e-mailing solution which can also earn you points for a possible season 3 airdrop:
And lastly, you can just hold $FTM
If you’re too lazy for any of the above options, the team has already explicitly stated several times that you will be able to exchange your $FTM to $S on a one-to-one ratio once Sonic mainnet goes live.
Conclusion
Personally, since the $200 million dollar Multichain hack which pretty much made the whole ecosystem collapse along with several others, I’ve still held onto my $FTM bags, and I’m delighted to see that the Fantom foundation has made such a big pivot with some really awesome tech.
Unfortunately however, in my opinion after using Sonic now for several days, I have a feeling that from all the bugs I’ve experienced on Sonic Arcade, that it’s going to be some time until Sonic actually goes on mainnet.
Have you already minted your shards? Or have you found any other ways to use the testnet? If so I’d love to hear about it in the comment section below.
And as always thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone!