SOON redefines blockchain speed and trust. Founded by Joanna Zeng, it merges AI and high-performance infrastructure to power real-world trading and next-generation finance.
From Wall Street to Web3, Joanna Zeng built SOON to rival traditional markets, delivering 30,000 TPS, 50ms block time, and AI-driven financial ecosystems.
SOON transforms performance into community power: ultra-fast chains, AI-native trading, and governance returning value to users, building the backbone of future decentralized finance.
As crypto enters a new cycle, one truth stands out: mass adoption requires better performance, user experience, and stronger trust. Hype alone is not enough. In this context, SOON is emerging as a highly watched high-performance blockchain infrastructure project.
Joanna Zeng, Co-Founder and CEO of SOON, has extensive experience across both traditional finance and core Web3 teams. Her career path, moving from Wall Street to Coinbase, Optimism, and Aleo, before founding SOON, reflects the industry's evolution and underpins the project's strategic direction.
Joanna began her career at Citibank and Lehman Brothers, where she witnessed the 2008 financial crisis firsthand on the trading floor. This experience highlighted how quickly trust can erode and how fragile a system becomes when centralized entities fail. Later, upon learning about Bitcoin and Ethereum, she recognized them not just as new assets but as novel methods for building transparent and programmable systems without reliance on trusted intermediaries.
With this perspective, she joined Coinbase, contributing to the launch of Prime Broker and the NFT Marketplace. She also led ecosystem growth at Optimism and was instrumental in building Aleo from its inception. In 2017, she co-founded CryptoNYC, a developer community. When asked about the impetus for starting SOON, her response was clear: for blockchains to handle real financial activity at scale, they must match traditional markets in speed and user experience.
SOON's Positioning: Making High-Performance Chains and AI Baseline Capabilities
Driven by this conviction, SOON established a clear objective: to make high performance accessible to everyone, not just a select few. The team developed a high-throughput, low-latency SVM execution stack, targeting block times around 50 milliseconds and throughput around 30,000 TPS. This stack is modular and offered as a service, enabling teams to quickly launch L1s, L2s, or high-performance exchanges. To demonstrate real-world value, SOON launched 100XSOON, an on-chain perpetuals platform featuring sub-5ms matching.
This platform offers a user experience comparable to centralized exchanges. SOON also introduced simpfor.fun for on-chain copy trading and social trading, integrating AI Vault and Alpha Arena to bring AI capabilities into trading. Over time, "high-performance chain + AI finance" has become SOON's core identity and its most recognized advantage.
From Tech to Market: Proving Performance in Real Trading
Joanna acknowledges that the growth journey was not without its challenges. In the early stages, the team's focus was excessively on raw performance metrics. However, speed alone is insufficient if developers and users are not actively building and trading on the network. Consequently, the team adjusted its strategy, aligning technology with market narratives and user needs. The core message became: performance must be validated in real markets.
SOON transitioned its infrastructure from a product to a service, abstracting it into the Infra Stack and Perp Stack. They utilized 100XSOON and simpfor.fun as clear entry points, which generated data and evidence proving the significance of their performance. This also attracted partners like Aster for deeper liquidity and system integration. Concurrently, SOON invested in events, AMAs, and community building to establish its brand as "high performance + real trading + global community."
SOON connected performance with culture, exemplified by the High Performance Day event featuring Jesse Lingard in Seoul.
The SOON Mascow cartoon displayed at Gangnam Station in Seoul attracted considerable attention.
As products matured and the ecosystem expanded, a growth flywheel was established: performance drives user experience, user experience attracts users, users build network effects, and the ecosystem subsequently strengthens both performance and brand.
Future Vision: AI-Native Finance and Open Community Governance
Looking ahead, performance will remain a fundamental aspect of competition. However, the next frontier lies in the integration of performance and intelligence. SOON will continue to enhance its execution layer and reduce latency for trading, while also embedding AI more deeply into the system. For instance, AI Vault allows users to deposit funds and follow AI strategies without the need for manual trader selection.
Simpfor.fun Integrates Alpha Arena and AI Vault.
This vision extends naturally into SOON's x402 Social Experiment Trilogy, which explores a future where AI agents achieve genuine economic autonomy. Through the x402 protocol, these agents can transact, launch assets, and deploy new high-performance chains directly on SOON.
This initiative lowers the barrier to entry and brings on-chain finance closer to automated, institution-grade strategies. The long-term objective is to create a base network where strategies, data, liquidity, and execution operate efficiently on-chain. SOON aims to become the default infrastructure for traders and developers, serving as the foundational layer for future AI-native finance.
Community culture is also a cornerstone of SOON. Joanna expressed gratitude to the community, emphasizing that members are not merely participants but also decision-makers. A recent SIP-3 proposal removed the foundation's long-term staking boost, redirecting rewards back to individual stakers. This action reflects SOON's principle of returning value to its users. Joanna stated that the ecosystem is not controlled by a single team but is collaboratively built by users, developers, and holders. SOON is committed to improving governance and incentives to ensure that every user shares in the ecosystem's growth.
In essence, SOON's narrative has evolved beyond simply "building the fastest chain" as an isolated engineering goal. It is now focused on constructing the next stage of Web3 infrastructure, characterized by performance as the engine, AI as the intelligence layer, real-world applications as the landing point, and community and governance as enduring driving forces.
This plan is both clear and ambitious, addressing genuine needs and propelling Web3 closer to mainstream finance. As DeFi and AI converge, SOON may be charting the course for the next market cycle. The ultimate goal is a chain capable of handling billions in capital, supporting real-time trading for millions of users, and facilitating algorithmic markets at scale. In such a future, Web3 will represent not just a concept but a fundamental infrastructure shift.