Sophon, a project that raised between $60 million and $70 million, announced on June 25, 2026, that it is shutting down its ZK-powered Layer 2 blockchain and pivoting entirely to building consumer applications on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2. The company cited a fundamental belief that the infrastructure era of crypto is over and that value now resides at the application layer. Seb, Sophon's semi-anonymous co-founder and CEO, told The Block: "The bet is that the value has never been in who runs the rails, but rather always been in the products built on top."
Sophon’s leadership concluded that maintaining its own chain was not justified. Seb estimated the annual cost of chain infrastructure, data, analytics, and tooling vendors at around $3.4 million per year. By sunsetting the chain, the company will cut its yearly burn by roughly $3 million, extending its runway and freeing capital for product development. "Ecosystem farming is a graveyard," Seb added in a direct call to the rest of the industry. "The teams still running that playbook are chasing short-term vanity metrics and outsourcing product-market fit to third-party builders with no real incentive to help their business grow."
As part of the pivot, the role of the SOPH token will change dramatically. Previously used as the gas token for Sophon’s own blockchain, SOPH will now shift to a buyback-and-burn model tied directly to revenue from Sophon’s consumer products. "Significant portions of revenues generated by Pyre, XP, SophEarn, SophPlay, SophAI will be used to buy back SOPH on the open market and burn it — tying the token directly to the commercial success of a growing portfolio of consumer products," Seb explained. At the time of the announcement, SOPH was trading around $0.0048, down roughly 86% over the past year, according to CoinGecko.
The first application, Pyre, is launching in early July 2026. Described as an "entertainment finance" app, Pyre enables spending, saving, sending, and earning in dollars, with every transaction triggering a game that gives users a chance to win money back. Games include Inferno, Splash, and Scalp It. The app will also offer DeFi yield vaults, fractional tokenized equities trading through Dinari, leveraged perpetual futures through Avantis and Hyperliquid, prediction markets via Polymarket, and an AI-powered quant signal system for premium subscribers. Revenue streams include vault performance fees, trading fees, swap fees, and subscriptions.
Other products in the pipeline include SophEarn (standalone vault infrastructure) next month, Sophon Play (API for gamification) in Q3, XP.app (high-net-worth payments with custom hardware) in Q3–Q4, and SophAI (an AI product) entering alpha later this year. Sophon chose Base after evaluating multiple ecosystems, citing Base’s deep liquidity, Coinbase’s move to bring hundreds of millions of users onchain, and its lead in the agentic onchain economy through x402 and Base MCP.
