PANews June 26 report, according to The Block, Sophon, which has raised $70 million, is shutting down its Layer 2 blockchain and shifting to Base to build consumer applications, claiming the era of crypto infrastructure is over. Sophon co-founder Sebastien (Seb) said his team spent about $3.4 million a year to keep the blockchain running, and shutting it down will save roughly $3 million annually, allowing capital to be directly invested in application development. The role of the SOPH token will shift from an on-chain gas token to a vehicle for direct value accrual from product revenue. The team will use product revenue to buy back and burn SOPH on the open market, directly linking token value to the commercial success of the product.

Sophon plans to build five consumer applications on Base: Pyre, launching next month, is a gamified DeFi financial app where users can participate in games to win rewards on every payment over $1, while also offering DeFi yield vaults, tokenized stock trading, leveraged perpetual futures, and prediction markets. SophEarn, launching around the same time, is a standalone version of the Pyre vault. SophPlay will launch in Q3, opening Pyre’s gamification technology to developers via API. XP.app, a payment product for high-net-worth users, will launch in Q3 or Q4. SophAI is under development and expected to enter alpha testing later this year.