Sonic SVM has launched its Attention Capital Market (ACM) protocol upgrade, backed by strategic investments from DWF Labs and Awaken Finance, aiming to establish attention as a programmable on-chain asset.

Executive Summary

Sonic SVM has officially launched its Attention Capital Market (ACM) protocol upgrade, securing strategic investments from DWF Labs and Awaken Finance, aiming to establish attention as a programmable and tradable on-chain asset.

The Event in Detail

Sonic SVM, the first SVM network on Solana, has introduced its ACM protocol upgrade, marking a significant step towards formalizing and monetizing digital attention within the Web3 ecosystem. This initiative includes strategic investments from institutional players DWF Labs and Awaken Finance, underscoring growing interest in novel blockchain-based economic models. The ACM protocol seeks to define attention as a quantifiable, programmable, and tradable asset, building underlying infrastructure for its capital markets. This upgrade leverages Sonic SVM's prior experience with its TikTok game SonicX, which garnered millions of users, providing a foundation for integrating off-chain signals like exposure and clicks with on-chain metrics such as transactions and volume to create verifiable data layers. A comprehensive ACM Whitepaper, developed in collaboration with New York University computational economics expert Professor Xi Chen, outlines the framework, standardized metrics, cycles, and allocation mechanisms for this new asset class.

Deconstructing Financial Mechanics

The ACM protocol tokenizes attention, positioning it as a tradable asset through decentralized financial instruments. This system is built on the Hypergrid Shared State Network (HSSN) architecture, designed to systematically capture, quantify, and redistribute attention as programmable capital. Key innovations include the Attention Capital Funnel, which transforms off-chain awareness into measurable on-chain value; an Authority Score System, a PageRank-inspired approach rewarding individual program performance and network effects; and Programmatic Attention Metrics, which precisely measure engagement over defined epochs, incorporating activity metrics (user interactions, unique wallets) and economic metrics (transaction value flow, staking volume). The Attention Flywheel further incentivizes dApps to reinvest earned rewards, creating a self-sustaining economic loop. The protocol ensures the verifiability and integrity of integrated off-chain signals using a decentralized information marketplace framework that emphasizes compensation, input privacy via Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC), and output privacy through Differential Privacy (DP), operating without reliance on trusted third parties. Data providers receive financial tokens from a reward pool funded by data consumers, ensuring controlled privacy budgets and limited data leakage.

Business Strategy and Market Positioning

Sonic SVM's strategy involves creating a fully on-chain system that captures, rewards, and reinvests attention transparently. This approach seeks to address the increasing scarcity of human attention in the digital economy, particularly as AI reduces content production costs. By integrating Solana's high-performance capabilities with the scalability of Sonic HyperGrid, Sonic SVM positions itself as a Layer 2 rollup tailored for large-scale on-chain games and decentralized applications. The success of SonicX on TikTok, which achieved over one million verified users by offering a streamlined entry point into Web3 via account abstraction and automatic Solana wallet generation, demonstrates the platform's ability to bridge Web2 and Web3 user bases. Chris Zhu, CEO of Sonic, emphasized this mission to make Web3 technologies accessible. Dust Kinsa, CMO, highlighted that unlike projects focusing solely on platform-specific data like X, Sonic SVM's ACM integrates data across both on-chain and off-chain activities, including platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, alongside wallet connections and transactions. The roadmap includes three phases: Network Genesis (Q4/2024 - Q1/2025) with the $SONIC Token Generation Event, Mainnet Alpha Launch (Q1/2025) integrating essential services like DEXs and native mobile apps, and Ecosystem Expansion (Q2/2025) scaling through new SVMs and introducing staking rewards for $SONIC token holders.

Market Implications

The launch of Sonic SVM's ACM protocol and its strategic investments could significantly impact the Solana ecosystem and broader Web3 landscape by introducing a new primitive for monetizing user attention. If successful, this model could reshape how protocols and dApps design their economic incentives and user acquisition strategies, moving beyond traditional engagement metrics to verifiable, programmable attention capital. The ambition to create a standardized market for attention, enabling its direct monetization through DeFi instruments, has the potential to attract substantial capital and innovation. The public testnet phase is scheduled for June 2025, with the mainnet launch anticipated in Q3 2025, indicating a structured rollout. This development could catalyze increased corporate and developer adoption of Web3 technologies, particularly within the gaming and social media sectors, by offering a clear pathway to value creation from user engagement. Dust Kinsa noted that this initiative aims to create a "virtuous cycle that not only measures attention but connects attention as rewards to each party," fostering a more participatory marketplace.

Expert Commentary

Chris Zhu, CEO of Sonic SVM, stated, "We've created more than just technological infrastructure—we're launching a new economic paradigm where attention becomes a first-class asset class." He further elaborated, "In the information age, human attention is arguably our most valuable resource. Our protocol systematically captures, quantifies, and redistributes this attention as programmable capital. This is a huge implication to on-chain economies, especially on the appchain layer." Dust Kinsa, CMO of Sonic SVM, in an interview, articulated the project's vision: "Sonic SVM aims to create a new foundation for the Web3 economy through the 'Attention Capital Market (ACM)' model, which turns users' attention and participation themselves into capital." He also highlighted the differentiator by stating, "Unlike Kaito, which operates primarily on X data, Sonic SVM's ACM integrates data across on- and off-chain. It calculates scores by reflecting off-chain activities on platforms such as X, TikTok, and YouTube, as well as on-chain data like wallet connections and transactions."