Sonic Labs Provides Further Funding to Prof. Burgstaller's Research Lab to Drive Blockchain Virtual Machine Innovation

Sept. 18, 2025

The Embedded Systems Languages and Compilers (ELC) Lab at Yonsei University has received an unrestricted gift of $70,000 from Sonic Labs, the core development team behind Sonic, a high-performance EVM layer-1 blockchain. This raises Sonic Labs's total giving to the ELC lab to $150,000.

``The ELC lab significantly contributed to the off-chain testing technology for smart contracts, which effectively reduced end-to-end tests of our blockchain from several weeks to a few hours,'' said Michael Kong, CEO of Sonic Labs. ``Their method has largely improved the testability of blockchain virtual machine infrastructures, thereby addressing a real need with today's fast-moving DeFi sector.''

The new gift will be instrumental in devising space-efficient state representations that facilitate the execution of transactions in isolation and at scale. ``We are deeply grateful for the confidence shown by Sonic Labs. Their commitment to an unrestricted gift underscores their commitment to blockchain research and the need for a scalable testing infrastructure for the next generation of DeFi applications'' stated Prof. Burgstaller, director of the ELC lab.

Sonic is the highest-performing EVM blockchain platform. It is innovating within the blockchain industry and helping augment existing public distributed ledger technology.

Sonic Labs: https://soniclabs.com/
ELC Lab: https://elc.yonsei.ac.kr/