Introducing Sonar

Today, we are announcing Sonar – a new product by Echo that lets anyone host a public token sale.

We started Echo last year, with the goal to create more equal opportunity in private fundraising. Echo’s purpose was to let regular folks participate in seed-stage investing, particularly in crypto startups and tokens.

As we built Echo, we heard two major pieces of feedback from founders.

(1) We want public sales!

As Echo grew, some founders and projects began to do increasingly large sales through Echo. The largest was MegaETH, who sold $10m of their token through Echo at the end of last year.

But one major drawback of Echo is that these sales are private sales. They couldn’t tell their Discord or their Twitter followers that this sale was happening. When you sell on Echo, you sell to existing Echo communities.

Founders told us they wanted to advertise their sale to their followers, their Telegram, or their Discord. They wanted to sell to their own community, too!

This is not compatible with how Echo is structured (for boring reasons related to the law). Echo sales are private sales by nature, like the majority of early stage fundraising, and we’ve optimised for that.

So, we decided to build Sonar – a tool that lets founders host their own token sale. If they want to market their sale, it is their choice to do so! They are not constrained by Echo’s own private sale structuring needs when using Sonar.

(2) We don’t like the group structure!

Another piece of feedback we received from founders was around Echo’s group structure. Today, deals can only be posted by lead investors (known on Echo as Group Leads). They post their investments to their Echo members to share participation. This means, to host a fundraise on Echo, you need one of these lead investors to “endorse” your sale, by investing on the same terms as the followers.

Some founders told us they didn’t like the groups available, couldn’t get in touch with the group leads they liked, or just generally didn’t like this system.

With Sonar, founders no longer need someone to “endorse” their sale – they can self-host it, whenever they want. Echo does not even need to approve a founder to use Sonar – it is just a piece of software that anybody can take and use.

So, Introducing Sonar!

Sonar is software that founders can use to self-host a token-sale without any hassle.

It is flexible, so founders can host sales however they want (auctions, options drops, points systems, variable valuations and allocation sizes, etc). And you can use it no matter what your favourite blockchain is – whether that's Hyperliquid, Base, Solana or Cardano.

Sonar comes with a variety of configurable compliance tools for founders, and an integration with Echo’s eID attestation passport (allowing Echo’s existing users to register for your sale with one click, using Sonar, no faffing with more AML checks). If founders need additional information for legal reasons – since some founders may be more risk-averse than others – Sonar will attest that user’s investor status to the project, without passing on their personal data.

Sonar has tools for various kinds of compliance, but founders are ultimately responsible for choosing exactly how they want to do their sale. If you want to ban British people from participating, you can do that! If you want to let them in, well, that’s up to you as well. We don’t judge you. You can imagine Sonar as a configurable, two-click setup for self-hosting your token sale.

At Echo, we don’t really like launchpads. We think the incentives are a mess. So, we intentionally built Sonar in a way where founders self-host their sale. There is no “homepage” of upcoming sales. There is no way to sign up and be notified about all future sales.

The only way to find out about sales will be to go direct. We are trying to build infrastructure that brings skill expression back to primary investing. Investors should find and follow interesting projects by themselves.

We have built Sonar in a way where there may be 1,000 different sales happening simultaneously! The Echo team might not even know they are happening. We hope this should reward investors who are willing to research deeply and find interesting things by themselves.

And we hope this lets founders sell directly to their own communities – and not to a stale user list of token flippers that are not that interested in your project.

TLDR:

Sonar lets founders self-host a token sale, and takes care of whatever compliance stuff they might need, re-imagining some of the things we built for Echo for a new purpose.

It lets investors buy token sales, without sharing their personal data with projects by default – even if those projects require KYC. (There are some instances, such as court orders or regulatory investigations, where we may be forced to share data. But the goal is that, in the base case, Sonar can attest the user’s eligibility instead of handing it over – and thus your personal data does not need to be delivered to the 35 different teams you invested in this year, three of which have already rugged.)

Our goal with Sonar is to get as close to ICO-era market dynamics as possible, while providing compliant tools for founders who don’t want to go to jail etc.

To investors: hopefully this gives more projects the capability to self-host token sales. Like the ICO days, find projects you’re interested in and monitor them. Good luck!

To founders: if you want to grow your community, use Echo. If you have a big community already, use Sonar. Sonar’s beta is available to use today. Just get in touch!

Love u,

Cobbler