3 Strategies To Maximize Your Sonic Airdrop

Sonic (an evolution of Fantom) is an L2 EVM blockchain focused on DeFi. Its main appeals for builders and participants are its fee structure and speed. It’s become a very popular chain for DeFi enthusiasts, ranking 13 in TVL currently at $710 million and growing.

Its native token, S, is used as gas to pay for transaction fees to interact with its many apps. Sonic is distributing 190,500,000 S tokens as part of an airdrop campaign to reward participants in the network. The first season of the airdrop will conclude around June 2025, with 25% of the allocation immediately available and 75% vested over the 270 days (as NFTs, and therefore, these positions will be transferable).

Users can become eligible for the drop through two rewards programs: Sonic Points & Sonic Gems:

• Sonic Gems are developer-focused incentives that are exchangeable for liquid S by builders and can then be re-distributed as rewards to their own users.
• Sonic Points are more traditional airdrop points collected by performing various actions on the network.

There are many ways to qualify for both Sonic Points and Sonic Gem incentives through the various protocols of the chain, but the best ones are capital efficient AND potentially profitable outside of speculative point drops.

Let’s dive into 3 strategies that can maximize your eligibility for the Sonic airdrop – and also score you some yield! 👇

Get Started on Sonic

To start interacting with the protocols below, you will need some starting capital and some S tokens to pay for gas fees on a Sonic-compatible wallet. You can use any standard EVM wallet, such as Rabby or Metamask, and there are a number of bridges, such as deBridge, that are compatible with Sonic.

Strategy #1:

Looping on Silo Finance

This is probably the most popular and simple strategy to maximize your rewards and earn yield. It uses Silo, a popular lending protocol, on Sonic.

It revolves around the following loop:

• Get some stS either by staking S or swapping any token to stS on a DEX.
• Deposit stS into the S/stS lending market from Silo Finance, which earns you Sonic Points, Silo Points (which are the re-distributed Sonic Gems that Silo is getting), and yield (stS currently generates about 5% underlying yield, so you add this % to the supply APY on Silo).
• Borrow S from the market (The borrow APY should be lower than the sum of the underlying stS yield and the supply APY above if you want to earn yield).
• Swap this borrowed S for stS.
• Repeat step 2 onwards and loop back.

Since stS and S are very tightly correlated, there is lower risk of liquidation from borrowing the maximum amount, so you basically get 20x in terms of leverage on your points and yield with 95% loan-to-value.

On your deposited stS, you get 8x Sonic Points and 1 Silo Point per $1 (times 20 with leverage), and on your borrowed S, you get an extra 0.5 Silo Point per $1 (time 20 again). On top of that, you currently get 2% yield on the deposit stS. Now if the borrow rate for S is too high or the supply rate for stS is too low, you can loop the inverse (deposit S, borrow stS).

Note that this strategy is also available on Euler here, but you can only get 10x leverage on your capital because the cap is 90% LTV. However, it’s just a few clicks vs many with Silo so it depends if you want to maximize efficiency or make it easy on yourself. 

Let’s talk about a better Euler strategy we can use.

Strategy #2:

Euler Finance Rewards ft. Rings Protocol

Meet our two protagonists for this strategy: Euler Finance and Rings Protocol.

Euler is another existing lending protocol that just launched on Sonic and, with that, is providing incentives to Strategies on the network. 

Rings is a new meta-assets protocol for USDC, ETH & BTC on Sonic. Users can deposit such assets into Rings (which in turn deposits them into a Veda strategy vault earning yield) and, in return, mint the liquid Rings version of these assets that can be staked/locked for extra yield, or used across Sonic’s ecosystem.

So the interesting part here is that:

• Minting Rings assets grant you Sonic points and Rings points (aka Gems).
• You can use these Rings assets on Sonic protocols to earn yield + incentives.
• Euler has one-click looping so you get 10x on highly correlated asset strategies.

Let’s add that Rings has been rumored to have an airdrop, and we’ve got the perfect storm for a bit of a degen points/yield farming strategy!

On Euler, the two current incentivized markets that are both tightly correlated and with Rings assets are the USDC.e/scUSD and scETH/wstscETH. To pick which asset to lend and which to borrow, we can compare the max ROE from the strategy page on Euler.

If we choose to use the sc (aka the Rings) asset to lend, then we’ll have to mint it from Rings protocol. Then it’s a few clicks using the Multiply button on Euler to max loop and get the leverage we want.

Strategy 3:

Liquidity Pools on ShadowDEX

Shadow Exchange is one of the most prominent DEXs on Sonic. It boasts large volume, its own native token SHADOW, Sonic Points & Gems incentives as well as some interesting tokenomics.

But let’s focus on our airdrop strategy first! And for that, we’ll need to go back to our initial strategy for some context. So if a lot of users loop their S/stS on Silo and other protocols, where do they swap these assets?

On Shadow! And if they do that a lot, then they generate a lot of fees, which go to liquidity providers. Let’s add that liquidity providers get rewards in Sonic Points, Sonic Gems and SHADOW tokens. Doesn’t that seem like a capital-efficient strategy? It sure does!

With the most aggressive range settings, which can be used because of how closely S and stS are correlated, the pool currently has a 169% APR on capital along with 16x Sonic Points.

Note that you can also automate balancing as VFAT, a liquidity management tool powered by Sickle, is now compatible with Sonic and Shadow. You can also zap in/out, auto-compound, and more, but there are some unknowns about whether you get Sonic points from this or not.

Hedging These Strategies

A number of the above strategies rely on volatile assets such as S or ETH, so if these assets go down in price, it can severely impact their ROI or even make them completely unprofitable!

One way to hedge the downside risk is to open a short position for 1x the capital invested through a perpetual exchange, so that if the price goes down, the short position will make as much profit as the airdrop strategy capital will lose.

Sometimes funding can be earned (or paid) from these perpetual positions as well. Hyperliquid is a popular perpetual exchange that has S listed (but bridging from Arbitrum is needed), and Vertex is a perpetual exchange available on Sonic directly but is newer.

On the flipside, this hedge forfeits the potential profit from a price movement to the upside.

Looking Ahead

There will be more and more opportunities to earn points and yield on Sonic. Between new protocols launching every day on the chain (including rumors of a Pendle Sonic launch soon) and strategies being created, it may be difficult to keep up to date with developments on this new L2.

Here is a list of accounts that share good information about the ecosystem:

• https://x.com/SonicLabs: The official X account for Sonic
• https://x.com/AndreCronjeTech: Sonic's co-founder
• https://x.com/phtevenstrong & https://x.com/zerototom: Good threadoors for strategies
• https://x.com/SiloIntern: Silo Intern, very focused on Sonic right now