London, United Kingdom, June 25th, 2026, Chainwire
A $60M-raised L2 team chooses apps over infra. First product, Pyre, launches a new consumer category: entertainment finance. $SOPH joins Base as one of the largest project tokens in the ecosystem.
Sophon today announced it is sunsetting its ZK-powered layer-2 blockchain and relaunching as SOPH, a consumer product studio building on Base. The company is the first well-funded L2 team to publicly act on a thesis it has been signaling since September 2025: the infrastructure era of crypto is over.
Sophon raised $60M in 2024 to build a platform for onchain consumer experiences. That mission is unchanged. What’s changed is the company’s view of where the value gets created.
“We paused nine months ago and asked the basic question: was our own chain doing anything that justified spending millions a year on infrastructure? It wasn’t. Infrastructure is commoditized. For the mid- and long-tail of general-purpose chains, including ours, near-zero value gets created at the chain layer. It moves up to the app layer, where all that matters is utility, taste, and distribution. That’s the part we’re good at. The chain was the part we didn’t need.” – Seb, Founder & CEO of Sophon
Sophon is also publishing a direct call on the rest of the industry.
“Ecosystem farming is a graveyard,” said Seb. “The teams still running that playbook are chasing short-term vanity metrics and outsourcing product-market fit to third-party builders with no real incentive to help their business grow. The next phase of crypto will not be won by more empty infrastructure. It will be won by products people actually use.”
From infrastructure to applications
Sophon’s leadership concluded that the ecosystem-first model was the wrong path for the company. The issue was not simply competition for developer attention. It was that the entire premise had become flawed.
Consumer products cannot be outsourced to an ecosystem. Serious teams build where there is liquidity, distribution, infrastructure depth, and a direct path to users. Experiential general-purpose chains, by contrast, are left trying to manufacture activity through incentives, grants, and ecosystem campaigns. Sophon no longer believes that is a credible path to product-market fit.
The company made a different call: stop treating the chain as the product, and focus its treasury, team, and distribution on the applications directly.
“The goal has always been to be on the most realistic path to PMF, and startups don’t passively stay on that path. We decided to make some hard decisions to make us stronger than ever in this post-chain era, ready to ship truly net-new consumer finance and AI experiences at the scale Base unlocks.” – Oskari Tempakka, CMO of Sophon
The company will retain its consumer-focused core team, its treasury, and its product pipeline, which has been in development since 2025. Going forward, Sophon will operate as a technology studio focused on building consumer finance & AI products powered by crypto rails.
Sophon has built a reputation for high-taste experiences online and off. The company now plans to bring that same focus to user-facing products.
Why Base
Sophon evaluated multiple ecosystems before committing to Base.
The company believes onchain markets are entering a period of consolidation, mirroring the pattern seen in search, social, operating systems, and cloud infrastructure: three to five platforms win long-term, while the rest are absorbed, repositioned, or disappear.
Sophon believes Base is one of the chains that wins.
Coinbase is moving hundreds of millions of users onchain. Liquidity on Base is deeper than anywhere outside Ethereum mainnet. Base is also leading on the agentic onchain economy through x402, Base MCP, and adjacent infrastructure – a direction Sophon’s roadmap is built around.
“Base has the foundation we need to focus on world-class consumer experiences in finance and AI. Members of our leadership team have worked with the Base core team on and off for years. Their seriousness and execution is second to none. That matters as much as the tech.” – Oskari Tempakka adds
By moving to Base, Sophon no longer needs to maintain its own chain infrastructure. Instead, the company can focus its resources on product development, distribution, user acquisition, and the commercialization of its application stack.
Sophon’s products and Base’s foundation are complementary, the company says.
“If we’re right, others will follow.” – Seb, Founder & CEO of Sophon
The first product: Pyre
Pyre, launching early July, is Sophon’s first consumer product and the first commercial expression of a new category the company is naming: entertainment finance.
Pyre is a daily payments app for the next generation of consumer finance. It does what a finance app should do: spend, save, send, earn. The difference is in the moments around those actions. Every transaction in Pyre opens a “bill” inside the app. Users can play to flip the bill, or let it settle. On the safe end: free-to-play, no buy-in. On the spicier end: market positions with the bill on the line. A card that lets users pay and play.
Updates at @paywithpyre, and getpyre.com
What’s next
Pyre is the first product in Sophon’s pipeline. Additional consumer finance and AI products are planned for later this year, alongside infrastructure that will allow Sophon’s products and partners to build on the same rails powering Pyre.
That includes yield infrastructure for stablecoin-based savings and an entertainment finance API that can turn transactions, rewards, and financial actions into interactive experiences.
About SOPH
SOPH is a technology studio building at the intersection of consumer finance and AI. The company raised $60M in 2024, and previously operated a ZK-powered layer-2 blockchain before sunsetting that chain to focus on apps in June 2026. The $SOPH token represents exposure to the full SOPH portfolio, and joins Base as one of the largest project tokens in the ecosystem.
For more information, users can visit sophon.com.
Contact
CMO
Oskari Tempakka
Sophon Labs
[email protected]
Disclaimer: Any references to tokens, platforms, or services in this press release are informational only and should not be interpreted as a call to action.
