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

Ikon, once reported as “Korean Ethereum”, peaked early in 2018, but later struggled to preserve relevance in the middle of fierce competition and a changing tale.

Now Icon is back in the news when it recently announced that it has redirected to Sodax and migrates the entire defrastructure from its own Layer-1 blockchain to Sonic, an EVM compatible network that focuses on high-speed transactions.

Sonic himself is a product of a rebrand that changes from the name Fantom in 2024.

In an interview with Coindesk, ICON founded my Kim the logic behind switching from running an independent blockchain to effective outsourcing of the part of the operation to Sonic’s Layer-1 infrastructure.

“Back in 2017, we had to build our own LAG-1 because there was no other infrastructure available,” Kim said. “Today it doesn’t make an sense to buy and maintain your own Layer-1 property because there are cheaper, better options.”

According to Kim, outsourcing infrastructure to Sonic gives his team the opportunity to streamline expenses and sharpen their strategic focus on defi products.

“It significantly reduces our operating expenses with millions of dollars,” Kim told Coindesk. “There is less inflation for our tokens, and all this just makes financial sense.”

This is not so different from the manufacturing world. Foxconn and Taiwan Semiconductor are billions of dollars because companies like Apple and Nvidia do not have their own factories.

Similarly, the icon no longer has to carry the high fixed costs and risks associated with running an entire blockchain.

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

Kim also highlighted the benefits of risk reduction and noted that ICON’s defi layers can remain unaffected by infrastructure problems at Sonic, creating a valuable risk separation.

“There is the risk,” he explained. “If Sonic gets hacked, it’s obviously bad, but it’s not direct our fault. Sonic focuses solely on security and validator infrastructure so that we and other defi-barley men can focus on creating applications closer to end users.”

The strategy comes as the icon seeks to reinvent itself in the midst of diminished market influence. Once a top 20 cryptocurrency, the ICON ICX token crashed almost 99% from its high times at the end of 2018, and has since not recovered, according to CoingeCko data as investors moved against platforms that could better utilize the emergence of defi and NFTs.

“Layer-1 infrastructure just doesn’t make sense to most projects,” Kim argues. “Many people underestimated the efforts involved, the capital costs involved. There has been a misleaded premium investors located on Layer-1 projects, thinking that an ecosystem would naturally build itself. But it is expensive and rarely sustainable.”

Now redirected as Sodax and focused on transverse chain liquidity products, the project ICX tokens migrates to a new token, soda. While Sonic and Sodax’s tokens remain different, Kim stressed that Sonic’s fee-monetization mechanisms will channel transaction fees back to soda.

“Sonic allows 90% of transaction fees to flow back to Soda token holders,” Kim noted, emphasizing the financial incentive in their strategic turn.

On the question of this outsourcing model represents a broader trend, Kim predicted that many projects currently running Layer-1S are likely to rethink when market cycles are changing.

“Ethereum and Solana are good examples as they are fully focused on validators and network security,” he said. “We are at the forefront of turning the tendency to launch your own LAG-1’s. It’s just not viable for most projects in the long term.”

As the era of premium values ​​for proprietary Layer-1 platforms ends, more projects will, Kim said just want to focus on the product and not the infrastructure with the icon-now Sodax leader on this.

“We go back to the basics, lower our costs, streamline operations and double what we would originally do: put financial products directly in people’s hands.”