- SOON redefines blockchain speed and trust. Founded by Joanna Zeng, it merges AI and high-performance infra to power real-world trading and next-gen 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: real mass adoption needs better performance, better user experience, and stronger trust. Hype alone is not enough. In this context, SOON is becoming one of the most watched high-performance blockchain infrastructure projects.
Joanna Zeng, Co-Founder and CEO of SOON, has worked across both traditional finance and core Web3 teams. She moved from Wall Street to Coinbase, Optimism, and Aleo, and then founded SOON. Her path reflects the evolution of the industry and explains the logic behind the project.
Joanna began her career at Citibank and Lehman Brothers. She witnessed the 2008 financial crisis on the trading floor. She saw how fast trust can break and how fragile a system becomes when a few centralized entities fail. Later, when she learned about Bitcoin and Ethereum, she saw that they were not only new assets. They were new ways to build transparent and programmable systems without trusted middlemen.
With this view, she joined Coinbase and helped launch Prime Broker and the NFT Marketplace. She led ecosystem growth at Optimism and helped build Aleo from zero. In 2017, she also co-founded CryptoNYC, a developer community. When asked why she started SOON, her answer was direct: if blockchains want to carry real financial activity at scale, they must match traditional markets on speed and user experience.
SOON’S POSITIONING: MAKING HIGH-PERFORMANCE CHAINS AND AI A BASELINE CAPABILITY
From this belief, SOON set a clear goal: make high performance available to everyone, not only to a few players. The team built a high-throughput, low-latency SVM execution stack. It targets block times around 50 ms and throughput around 30,000 TPS. The stack is modular and delivered as a service. Teams can launch an L1, an L2, or a high-performance exchange quickly. To prove real-world value, SOON launched 100XSOON, an on-chain perpetuals platform with sub-5 ms matching.
It offers a user experience close to a centralized exchange. SOON also launched simpfor.fun for on-chain copy trading and social trading. It added AI Vault and Alpha Arena to bring AI into trading. Over time, “high-performance chain + AI finance” became SOON’s core label and best-known edge.
FROM TECH TO MARKET: PROVING PERFORMANCE IN REAL TRADING
Joanna admits that growth was not always smooth. In the early days, the team focused too much on raw performance numbers. But speed alone does not win if developers and users do not build and trade on the network. The team then adjusted the strategy. It aligned technology with market narrative and user needs. The message was simple: performance must prove itself in real markets.
SOON turned infra from a product into a service, abstracted it into the Infra Stack and Perp Stack, and used 100XSOON and simpfor.fun as clear entry points. These products created data and proof that the performance matters. They also drew in partners, such as Aster, for deeper liquidity and system integration. At the same time, SOON invested in events, AMAs, and culture-building to shape its brand as “high performance + real trading + global community.”
Screenshot
SOON connected performance to culture — from the High Performance Day with Jesse Lingard in Seoul
The SOON Mascow cartoon at Gangnam Station in Seoul garnered significant attention.
As products matured and the ecosystem expanded, a growth flywheel formed: performance drives experience, experience brings users, users build network effects, and the ecosystem then strengthens both performance and brand.
FUTURE VISION: AI-NATIVE FINANCE AND OPEN COMMUNITY GOVERNANCE
Looking ahead, performance will remain the base of competition. But the next step is the mix of performance and intelligence. SOON will keep improving the execution layer and cutting latency for trading. It will also embed AI deeper into the system. For example, AI Vault lets users deposit funds and follow AI strategies without picking traders by hand.
Simpfor.fun Integrates Alpha Arena and AI Vault
This vision extends naturally into SOON’s x402 Social Experiment Trilogy, exploring a future where AI agents gain real economic autonomy. Through the x402 protocol, these agents can transact, launch assets, and deploy new high-performance chains directly on SOON.
This lowers the barrier to entry and brings on-chain finance closer to automated, institution-grade strategies. The long-term vision is a base network where strategies, data, liquidity, and execution move efficiently on-chain. SOON aims to be the default infrastructure for traders and developers, and the base layer for future AI-native finance.
Community culture is also central to SOON. Joanna thanked the community and stressed that members are not only participants but decision makers. A recent SIP-3 proposal removed the foundation’s long-term staking boost and returned rewards to individual stakers. This shows SOON’s principle: let value go back to users. Joanna said the ecosystem is not controlled by one team. It is built by users, developers, and holders together. SOON will improve governance and incentives so every user can share the growth.
In short, SOON’s story is no longer about “building the fastest chain” as a single engineering goal. It is about building the next stage of Web3 infrastructure: performance as the engine, AI as the intelligence layer, real applications as the landing point, and community and governance as lasting drivers.
This plan is clear and ambitious. It answers real needs and helps Web3 move closer to mainstream finance. As DeFi and AI come together, SOON may be drawing the map for the next cycle. The goal is a chain that can handle billions in capital, real-time trading by millions of users, and algorithmic markets at scale. In that world, Web3 is not only a story. It is an infrastructure shift.
〈Interview with SOON CEO Joanna Zeng: Building the Next Web3 Finance Layer with Performance + AI〉這篇文章最早發佈於《CoinRank》。
