Sonic Labs Co-founder: Sonic spent 35.6 million dollars last year on R&D, ecology, legal matters, infrastructure, and other purposes
ChainCatcher message, Sonic Labs (formerly Fantom) co-founder Andre Cronje stated: "The real cost of running a blockchain (even a semi-successful one) for all L2s or application chains is as follows: the upfront cost for oracles and stablecoins is $7.5 million, with an annual cost of $3.5 million; the upfront cost for RPC, indexing, and dashboards is $200,000, with an annual cost of $700,000; VRF, Keepers, wallet support, and governance cost $500,000 annually; explorers, custody, and risk management cost $800,000 annually, totaling $13.2 million. The above applies only to Sonic.
Here is our cost situation from last year: R&D $10.9 million; ecosystem $10.7 million; legal $410,000; compliance $3.8 million; infrastructure $2.4 million; marketing $1.4 million; bounties $1.2 million; sponsorship $400,000; media $350,000; regulation $200,000; events $100,000; total cost $35.6 million. (The above does not include exchange listings, fortunately, we do not need to do this this year.)"