Andre Cronje leaves Sonic Labs board as S token plunges 97%

Andre Cronje, Michael Kong and David Richardson resigned from the Sonic Labs board this week, handing operational control to a new executive team. Matt Visser was named chief executive officer and Kosta Kourkoumelis will serve as chief operating officer.

Sonic Labs confirmed the departures in a statement on X, noting the three founders remain financially invested but will no longer make business decisions for the project.

Visser wrote that he will pursue steady, incremental changes. “I am not here to promise an instant turnaround. I am here to make Sonic 1% better every single day and let that compound,” he wrote on X.

The company said it will create a risk and compliance committee, shift decision-making to a more public process, reduce announcements that lack substance and provide a disclosure email for token-holder concerns.

The S token traded recently between $0.028 and $0.031, roughly 97% below its January 2025 peak near $1.03. The token fell about 5% in the 24 hours after the board announcement. Sonic Labs acknowledged the token is down and community sentiment is low.

Total value locked on the network dropped from a May 2025 high of $1.14 billion to about $20 million, a decline of about 98% based on on-chain data.

Cronje, who served as Sonic’s chief technology officer and is known for creating Yearn Finance, posted on X that he has focused for the past 18 months on Flying Tulip, a DeFi platform offering real-yield stablecoin products. He wrote Flying Tulip has about $70 million in TVL across three systems and is earning near 16% APY on USDC and USDT on Ethereum and about 8% on Sonic.

Cronje added that he was the original technical architect of the legacy Opera network, not its founder, and that he opposes shutting down Opera.

Michael Kong previously led the Fantom Foundation as CEO and David Richardson served as executive chairman. Cronje stepped back from public-facing crypto work in March 2022, citing regulatory pressure and burnout, before returning to help build Sonic’s technical architecture. Sonic Labs did not provide a timetable for further governance changes.