Sonic Labs Dumps Wintermute in Shakeup—Scrambles for New Liquidity Partner

Sonic Labs pulls the plug on Wintermute after what insiders call ’creative differences’—aka another crypto project realizing market makers aren’t magic liquidity fairies.

The DeFi upstart is now hunting for a replacement to prop up its tokenomics—because nothing says ’healthy ecosystem’ like frantically courting firms that profit from your volatility.

Watch this space for the next chapter in ’When Gamblers Try to Build Banks.’

Sonic grows a decentralized ecosystem

Sonic has grown its decentralized ecosystem and seeks market makers to support teams, apps, and liquidity events. The chain recently posted a record in its total value locked at over $1B, becoming one of the fastest-growing chains in 2025. 

The Sonic ecosystem includes a native version of Aave lending, the Shadow DEX, as well as a version of the Pendle yield protocol. Sonic was mostly supplied by the ethereum ecosystem, with $2.3B in inflows and $555M in net inflows. Sonic remains connected to the L1 ecosystem with constant bridging and active turnover. The chain also has small inflows from Base and Solana. 

In the past months, Sonic also saw constantly expanding transactions, active wallets, and fees. However, Sonic still produces under $15K in daily fees, lagging behind more established networks. 

The chain carries more than $484M in bridged USDC, supporting between $100M and $150M in daily DEX activity. The Shadow exchange carries over $55M of the daily DEX activity, trading some of the most prominent tokens in the Sonic ecosystem.

The chain regularly carries over 50K daily active users, rivaling similar networks. Sonic also retains a large social media community, aiming to build an ecosystem similar to solana based on cheap transactions and available liquidity.

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