Andre Cronje, Two Directors Quit Sonic Labs as S Token Falls

Sonic Labs announced on Friday that three long-time board members – Andre Cronje, Michael Kong and David Richardson – resigned as the company named Matt Visser chief executive officer and Kosta Kourkoumelis chief operating officer. Sonic Labs said the departing directors will remain investors but will no longer make business or governance decisions.

Visser wrote that his initial priorities are restoring operational discipline and rebuilding trust with the community rather than unveiling a new product roadmap. He added, “I am not promising an instant turnaround.” The company also announced the formation of a risk and compliance committee and a commitment to more transparent governance processes.

At the time of the announcement the S token traded around $0.028, down about 10% in the prior 24 hours and roughly 97% below its $1.03 all-time high from January 2025. The network's market capitalization is near $107 million and total value locked across Sonic's decentralized finance protocols stood at about $26 million, down from a peak above $1.1 billion in May 2025.

Cronje published a separate statement describing his role at Sonic. He wrote that he led technical work including the design of the Sonic Gateway but did not design or execute the migration from FTM to S, did not control token emissions or incentives, and did not support winding down Sonic's legacy Opera network. He clarified he was “not a founder of the company or original token project” and said earlier references to being a co-founder described his technical contribution rather than ownership.

He plans to concentrate on Flying Tulip, his decentralized exchange, which raised $200 million in August 2025 at a $1 billion fully diluted valuation and later completed a private token sale. Cronje reported Flying Tulip has reached about $70 million in total value locked across three deployments.

Sonic Labs reported engineering work continued during the leadership transitions, citing about 400 pull requests merged in 2026, two releases shipped so far this year, a 2.2.0 release in development with six release candidates, and a private testnet under testing. The company stated it would not characterize the leadership change as a recovery and acknowledged weak token price and community sentiment.

This is the second major leadership change at Sonic Labs in nine months. In September 2025 the company appointed Mitchell Demeter as CEO to support a plan to enter U.S. capital markets after passing a $150 million proposal; Demeter and business head Evan Owens resigned in February 2026, after which the board ran operations directly until the current appointments.

Market observers noted the scale of the token's decline. Bobby Ong, co-founder of CoinGecko, commented that the drop in S's price over the last year was significant and suggested the market may not yet have bottomed.