On June 19, @SonicLabs announced a surprising leadership change. Like many $S community members, we were initially skeptical and concerned about this shift. Now, 50 days in, I feel confident that the Sonic ecosystem is headed in the right direction. I can confidently say that the new Sonic leadership team is among the most professional executives I have worked with across my 20 year career alongside other C-suites. On our first meeting, they came with a viable plan and got right to work. Our teams continue to hold weekly, action oriented meetings. I have personally had two direct calls with the new CEO @MattVisser, with another scheduled for next week. We speak the same language, demanding real results week in and week out from each other. I was very direct with Matt when we first spoke. I told him that we migrated to Sonic from our own L1 (ICON) because our engineers genuinely preferred building here. We did not stop at building either. We invested a 7-figure sum to acquire $S, we run a validator to help secure the network, and we sponsored and attended the Sonic Summit in Vienna, Singapore, and New York. We made a substantial effort to align ourselves with Sonic and become a core, contributing part of this community. However, that alignment had not been reciprocal, which was tough to square with our level of commitment. Matt understood that immediately and went to work to restore true alignment. To me, real alignment means that at this stage of the ecosystem and the broader crypto market, we need to work together to grow the pie rather than waste time debating what is in it for one party versus another. For example, as a recent post highlighted, scaling the USSD stablecoin is a major focus for Sonic. On July 29, we integrated USSD as money market collateral within the SODAX SDK, allowing users to supply USSD and borrow against native assets against it. When an initiative like USSD is a priority for Sonic, we make it a priority for SODAX, building key infrastructure around it to drive growth. This is just one of many examples where we are taking action. With stronger alignment, we can accelerate ecosystem growth much faster, and I am genuinely excited about what we are executing right now. I am looking forward to the next 50 days. Sustainable success takes time and ultimately depends on generating real, tangible revenue for both Sonic and its partners. As Matt wrote: “As the business units described above start producing revenue we can point to, the mechanism for how that reaches S holders gets designed and published.” We could not agree more.(Min 🥤)