Sonic Labs said its three founding board members – Andre Cronje, Michael Kong and David Richardson – were resigning from the board and named Matt Visser as chief executive officer and Kosta Kourkoumelis as chief operating officer, part of a leadership overhaul at the blockchain network whose token and chain businesses have collapsed over the past year. The company disclosed the changes in a post on
Sonic’s S token trades at around $0.031, or a fully diluted valuation of $120 million, down around 97% from its January 2025 high of $1.03, according to CoinGecko data. The token has fallen about 30% over the past 30 days, compared to a 19% decline for Bitcoin over the same period. The total value locked on Sonic, a measure of assets deposited in its DeFi protocols, was around $20 million, down around 98% from the May 2025 peak of $1.14 billion, according to DefiLlama.
The shakeup removes from business decision-making the figures who built the network – Cronje, the DeFi developer behind Yearn Finance who led the rebranding of Fantom to Sonic, chief among them – and pairs the exit with public commitments to transparency, compliance and rebuilding holder trust. This caps more than a year of leadership on a network that once ranked among the largest Layer 1 ecosystems in terms of deposits.
A board-led structure collapses
Cronje, Kong and Richardson “remain invested in Sonic’s success” and fully discharge their responsibilities, the company said, adding that the three “will no longer make business decisions for the organization.”
The departures complete a turnover that began in late 2025. Sonic Labs, formerly Fantom Foundation, named Mitchell Demeter as CEO in September 2025, with Kong becoming chief information officer and Cronje becoming chief technology officer. Demeter and business leader Evan Owens resigned in February 2026, after which the board of directors – including Cronje and Kong – took over operations directly. Visser and Kourkoumelis now replace this board-led structure.
Visser said his priority was “operational discipline and regaining trust, in that order”, rather than revealing a road map.
“I’m not here to promise instant relief,” Visser said in the announcement. “I’m here to improve Sonic 1% every day and let it get worse.”
Recognize the slide
The company did not frame the changes as a recovery, instead clearly stating that “the token is down” and “community sentiment is down,” and said it would not change the position.
Sonic has defined four commitments: publishing decisions and the reasoning behind them; the establishment of a committee dedicated to risks and compliance; Treat S holders as stakeholders rather than “a vanity measure”; and reduce announcements in favor of scheduler updates. It directed disclosures and concerns to a dedicated email address.
Sonic said its engineering output has not slowed down following the management changes. The company reported that 400 pull requests have been merged into its main GitHub branch so far in 2026, two official releases shipped, a 2.2.0 release in active development with six release candidates, and a private testnet under testing.
Cronje remains tied to the ecosystem through Flying Tulip, the DeFi exchange he’s building on Sonic, which raised capital at a $1 billion valuation earlier this year even as the S token slipped — a gap between his new company’s valuation and that of the network that the board change doesn’t resolve.
Visser and Kourkoumelis are largely unproven in public leadership of a network of this size, and the “1% better” framework sets no measurable short-term goals against which holders can judge progress.
Sonic said he would be judged as a team over the next 100 days. The return of on-chain deposits and token holders will be the clearest test of whether the new leaders’ promises translate into activity.
