The last time ICON (ICX) was making headlines, it was at the height of the ICO bubble when it was competing with Tron and Filecoin to buy BitTorrent in a high-profile bidding war.

ICON, once heralded as the “Korean Ethereum,” peaked early in 2018 but later struggled to retain relevance amid fierce competition and a changing narrative.

Now, ICON is back in the news, as it recently announced that it has rebranded to SODAX and is migrating its entire DeFi infrastructure from its own Layer-1 blockchain to Sonic, an EVM-compatible network focused on high-speed, low-cost transactions.

Sonic itself is a product of a rebrand, shifting from the name Fantom in 2024.

In an interview with CoinDesk, ICON founder Min Kim explained the logic behind shifting from running an independent blockchain to effectively outsourcing that part of the operation to Sonic’s Layer-1 infrastructure.

“Back in 2017, we had to build our own Layer-1 because there wasn’t any other infrastructure available,” Kim said. “Today, buying and maintaining your own Layer-1 property just doesn’t make sense anymore because there are cheaper, better options available.”

According to Kim, outsourcing infrastructure to Sonic allows his team to streamline expenses and sharpen their strategic focus on DeFi products.

“It significantly cuts our operating expenses by millions of dollars,” Kim told CoinDesk. “There’s less inflation for our tokens, and all of this just makes financial sense.”

This isn’t all that dissimilar from the manufacturing world. Foxconn and Taiwan Semiconductor are billion-dollar companies because firms like Apple and Nvidia don’t have their own factories.

Similarly, ICON no longer needs to bear the high fixed costs and risks associated with running an entire blockchain.

“Maintaining a decentralized network with validators around the world is a huge undertaking,” Kim explained. “We have eight years of experience running our own Layer-1. It’s tedious, costly, and very stressful. Outsourcing to Sonic allows us to focus on innovation and delivering products that people actually want.”

Kim also highlighted the risk reduction benefits, noting that ICON’s DeFi layer can remain unaffected by infrastructure issues at Sonic, creating a valuable risk separation.

“There’s de-risking,” he explained. “If Sonic gets hacked, obviously it’s bad, but it’s not directly our fault. Sonic focuses solely on security and validator infrastructure, so we and other DeFi builders can focus on creating applications closer to end-users.”

The strategy comes as ICON seeks to reinvent itself amid diminished market influence. Once a top 20 cryptocurrency, ICON’s ICX token crashed nearly 99% from its all-time highs by late 2018, and has since not recovered, according to CoinGecko data, as investors moved toward platforms better able to capitalize on the rise of DeFi and NFTs.

“Layer-1 infrastructure just doesn’t make sense for most projects,” Kim argued. “Many underestimated the effort, the capital expenses involved. There’s been a misguided premium investors placed on Layer-1 projects, thinking an ecosystem would naturally build itself. But that’s costly and rarely sustainable.”

Now rebranded as SODAX and focused on cross-chain liquidity products, the project is migrating ICX tokens to a new token, SODA. While Sonic and SODAX’s tokens remain distinct, Kim emphasized that Sonic’s fee-monetization mechanisms will channel transaction fees back to SODA holders.

“Sonic allows 90% of transaction fees to flow back to SODA token holders,” Kim noted, underscoring the economic incentive of their strategic pivot.

Asked if this outsourcing model represents a broader trend, Kim predicted that many projects currently running Layer-1s will likely reconsider as market cycles shift.

“Ethereum and Solana are great examples as they’re fully focused on validators and network security,» he said. «We’re at the forefront of reversing the trend of launching your own Layer-1s. It’s just not viable for most projects long-term.”

As the era of premium valuations for proprietary Layer-1 platforms ends, more projects, Kim said, are going to just focus on the product and not the infrastructure with ICON – now SODAX – leading the way on this.

“We’re going back to basics, lowering our costs, streamlining operations, and doubling down on what we originally wanted to do: put financial products directly into people’s hands.”

Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered crypto bank and custodian, said on Monday it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire stablecoin issuer Mountain Protocol as part of its strategy to deepen support for institutional stablecoin use.

Anchorage said it plans to fold the Mountain’s technology, team and licensing structure into its own operations, pending closing procedures and regulatory sign-off.

«Stablecoins are becoming the backbone of the digital economy,» Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage, said in an statement. «With recent regulatory progress and new institutional use cases, our long-term vision is clear: every business will be a stablecoin business.»

«By acquiring Mountain Protocol, we are taking a significant step forward in supporting institutional stablecoin adoption and advancing a new era of safety, security, and regulatory compliance in the global digital asset ecosystem,» McCauley added.

The move comes as the stablecoin adoption is soaring, with payment firms, fintechs and even banks eyeing the asset class with legislation looming in the U.S. to regulate. These cryptocurrencies are anchored to an external asset, predominantly to the U.S dollar, and offer a cheaper, faster alternative to traditional payment rails with programmable transfer and . The market could grow to trillions of dollars in this decade from the current $230 billion size, according to Citi.

The market is getting increasingly competitive, too, leading to consolidation. Earlier this year, USDC issuer Circle acquired tokenization startup Hashnote, issuer of the yield-bearing USDY token.

Mountain, regulated by the Bermuda Monetary Authority, issues the yield-bearing USDM stablecoin backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries. The token, launched in late 2023, saw a rapid growth in its early months to $150 million supply, coinciding with a reward program, but then declined to $50 million, per RWA.xyz data.

Leemon Baird first published his work on hashgraph consensus in 2016, positioning it as an alternative to traditional blockchain architectures. With a background in computer science and a career spanning both academia and industry, Baird co-founded Hedera to commercialize the technology.

His academic trajectory is notable for his early work in neural networks and reinforcement learning during the 1990s, a period when AI research was navigating what would later be called the «AI winter.» Since then, the Hedera project has evolved in a landscape crowded with competing distributed ledger approaches, each claiming technical superiority and targeting different segments of the market.

Baird, a speaker at Consensus 2025, transitions easily between technical explanations and business strategy, reflecting the dual challenges of building both a novel technology and a viable ecosystem around it.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

CoinDesk: Your hashgraph algorithm emerged in 2016, during a period when many alternative consensus mechanisms were being proposed. What technical limitations of earlier approaches were you specifically trying to address?

Baird: I love computer science and the math side of it—inventing things and solving problems. When I became an entrepreneur 25 years ago, it was the same process. The core of what I always do is trying to understand the fundamental problem we’re trying to solve. What is the real question? What are we really trying to accomplish? And then you build on that and solve that problem. In blockchain, the fundamental question I asked was: Bitcoin is cool, but it’s slow and not as secure as it could be with ABFT [Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance]. It burns a lot of energy and isn’t as flexible as we might want. I wondered if, at the very bottom layer in the consensus itself, there might be a way to avoid burning lots of energy while still being fast and secure. Is it possible to achieve ABFT—the strongest kind of security—while also being super fast and not burning electricity or dumping carbon into the atmosphere?

I started working on this in 2012 as one of many math problems I was exploring. Initially, I was convinced it couldn’t be done. I’d pick up the problem, play with it, and convince myself it was impossible—over and over again. But in 2015, I realized that by throwing in two hashes, suddenly it all falls into place. You can have ultimate speed—essentially at the speed of the internet—while also having ultimate security with ABFT. And it’s proof of stake, so you don’t waste electricity.

From a business perspective, the question was: what is the right way to govern this? When we look at blockchains, they often claim, «We won’t have any governance. Anyone can help do it.» But power over time can consolidate—you end up with a handful of developers or people behind the scenes controlling everything.

With Hedera, we started differently. We made governance decentralized from the very beginning. We brought in some of the biggest organizations in the world—top universities and businesses spread globally that people trust and that have reputations to protect. They balance each other, creating checks and balances, and together they govern the system.

It was about addressing the fundamental question: what do you really want in governance? What will give you true trustlessness, or at least a lower bar of trust needed to fully trust the system? That was our answer—approaching business questions with the same rigor as mathematical ones.

CoinDesk: You’ve mentioned RWA tokenization, carbon credits, and stablecoins as key use cases. These are areas where nearly every major blockchain is focusing. What specific implementations on Hedera have demonstrated meaningful transaction volumes or user adoption?

Baird: I would highlight four key areas:

First, AI is extremely exciting right now. The dangers of AI are also concerning, which is why we need to establish provenance, governance, and version control for AIs. People need to know if they can trust what’s happening. Hedera helps with AI in multiple ways, including permissioning data and potentially handling royalties for people providing training data. The work that EQTY Lab is doing with NVIDIA and Intel on Hedera is particularly exciting.

Second, real-world asset tokenization is transforming how we handle valuable assets. We have numerous projects tokenizing real estate, gold, diamonds, carbon credits, and even carbon emissions on Hedera. From the beginning of blockchain technology, I’ve maintained that what’s important isn’t pictures of monkeys or games—it’s that all things of value on the planet will ultimately be put onto these ledgers.

Third, stablecoins are essential if you want real-world adoption. We’ve created a Stable Coin Studio to make stablecoin development easy on Hedera. The Hedera Council includes many financial institutions doing impressive work with stablecoins.

Fourth, immutable data records are almost unique to Hedera through our Hedera Consensus Service. This allows messages to be sent to topics with access controls and immutable recording. Companies like Hyundai and Kia use this for emissions tracking throughout their supply chain.

CoinDesk: UCL’s research on energy consumption compared various networks, but methodology matters significantly in these comparisons. Proof-of-stake systems generally have similar profiles, with differences coming down to node count and hardware requirements. Does Hedera’s approach differ fundamentally from other PoS networks, or is the efficiency primarily from the current network configuration?

Baird: We’ve been thoughtful about energy consumption from the very beginning. Everything—from our algorithms to how nodes are run and governed, and the fact that we use proof of stake instead of proof of work—laid the foundation for low emissions from day one.

This created a virtuous cycle. Early adopters looking to tokenize carbon credits chose the green blockchain. Then, people who wanted to tokenize emissions and credits wanted to use the same blockchain where everyone else was doing similar work. This flywheel effect has made Hedera perhaps the most popular blockchain in the green technology space.

According to University College London, Hedera has the lowest carbon emissions per transaction of any blockchain. We also purchase carbon credits to be carbon negative. Being green was baked into our structure from the start, which is why we’ve become a leader in this area.

CoinDesk: We’re seeing a lot of projects attempting to combine AI and blockchain technologies. Given the different computational paradigms these systems operate under, what realistic integration points do you see beyond the marketing narratives?

Baird: The intersection of AI and blockchain is more significant than most people realize. On Hedera, we’re seeing real traction in several areas:

Providence and governance is critical. As we enter a world where everything will be AI-generated, we need to know we can trust the AI. This requires digital signatures to verify origins—whether human or AI-created.

Data permissioning is another crucial intersection. When thousands of people contribute small amounts of data to train an AI, each person needs control over their data—the ability to give or withdraw permission.

Looking forward, I’m most excited about using Hedera for identity and incorporating identity into AI systems. We’re reaching a point where you can’t distinguish AI-generated media from reality. The only solution is digital signatures—content needs to be signed by the photographer or reporter. But then you need trusted identity systems to verify those signatures.

CoinDesk: Having studied neural networks in the 1990s, long before the current AI boom, what’s your perspective on today’s large language models? Has something fundamentally changed in the technology, or are we just seeing the results of scale?

Baird: Many AI developments have unfolded exactly as I expected. When AlphaGo defeated the world’s Go champion, when AlphaZero mastered chess, when AIs conquered poker—I had anticipated all of it. They even used nearly the same techniques I’d envisioned. We simply needed faster computers.

Self-driving cars, too, are progressing precisely as I predicted, using the methods I foresaw.

But ChatGPT and Large Language Models (LLMs) have utterly astonished me. The transformer architecture from 2017—described in the paper «Attention is All You Need»—represented a breakthrough that no one could have anticipated. Back in the 90s, we were completely stumped by language processing—trying various approaches, but failing at every turn.

The capabilities of today’s LLMs still astound me, and their future remains unpredictable. Will they reach superintelligence? Or will they hit a ceiling? I don’t know—and I’d contend that nobody does.

Humanoid robots have also surpassed expectations. While their physical development has matched my predictions, their conversational abilities—powered by LLMs—have far exceeded what I imagined possible. In the coming years, they’ll begin with basic factory work before advancing to skilled trades like welding, plumbing, and electrical work.

These technological advances will make the Industrial Revolution look minor in comparison. Most people haven’t grasped the magnitude of these changes or how rapidly they’re approaching.