Proof of Stake

The Sonic chain is secured using a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism.

In PoS on Sonic, validators must lock their S (Sonic's native token); if they act maliciously in the network, they lose their tokens. Validators are incentivized to act in the network's best interest as their own funds are at stake. Since validators do not need to perform computations, this approach is a much more energy-efficient alternative to proof-of-work for achieving resistance to Sybil attacks.

A Sybil attack is an attack where a malicious actor runs a large number of validators to allow them an unsafe amount of influence over the network. PoS makes it costly to set up these validators and allows the network to punish validators for malicious behavior, increasing the costs of attacks.

Sonic requires nodes to lock up at least 500,000 S to validate transactions and produce blocks.