What is Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Fantom (FTM)?

What is Fantom?

Fantom is a high performance and scalable DAG-based decentralized smart contract platform (directed acyclic graph). It is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and supports smart contracts and decentralized applications in the Solidity language.

Thanks to the ease of migration, fast and cheap transactions, the Fantom network has formed a vast ecosystem of dozens of blockchain projects, including decentralized exchanges, DeFi lending protocols, and NFT marketplaces.

In autumn 2021, the Fantom ecosystem entered the top 10 blockchain platforms by the amount of blocked funds, and the number of unique addresses in the network exceeded 1 million.

Who and when created Fantom?

Fantom Foundation Ltd was registered in early 2018 in South Korea. The founder and CEO of the project is Ahn Byung Ik, known in his country for creating the app for rating restaurants SikSin. He is also the president of the Korea Food-Tech Association and has close ties to his alma mater, Yonsei University, the oldest in South Korea.

Initially, the Fantom Foundation team consisted mainly of South Korean developers, and the first partnerships were in the local food technology industry.

Subsequently, the Fantom Foundation changed jurisdiction to the Cayman Islands, and the management team changed significantly, becoming international. The positions of CEO and IT director were taken by Australian Michael Kong, and Andre Cronje, known in the community for the yEarn Finance project, became the main DeFi developer.

Seed and two private rounds of investments passed February to May 2018during which the project raised funds a number of venture fundsincluding Hyperchain Capital, Signum Capital, 8Decimal, Obsidian CapitalArrington XRP Capital, Bibox Fund, Link VC, Nirvana Capital, JRR Crypto and others.

Fantom public token sale in ICO format took place in June 2018. The project was positioned as “the world’s first DAG-based smart contract platform that solves the problem of scaling and speed of transaction confirmation.”

According to white paperthe Fantom platform was going to be implemented in various industries, including telecommunications, food technology, finance, logistics, smart cities and others.

During private and public token sales, developers sold 40% of the 3.175 billion FTM tokens in total and raised about $39.65 million.

Fantom was developed in Rust, Golang and Java. The team initially announced future performance of up to 300 thousand TPS, but later the figure was adjusted to 4500 TPS.

The launch of the Fantom testnet took place in December 2018, and the mainnet a year later, on December 27, 2019.

Currently, the Fantom Foundation is fully responsible for the development of the project and network management with the support of the community and validators. In the future, project management will pass into the hands of FTM token holders.

How does the Fantom blockchain work?

DAG-based architecture is used by blockchain projects such as IOTA, Nano, Dero, Coti and others. However, Fantom is the first to implement support for smart contracts based on a directed acyclic graph.

Fantom technology is based on a consensus mechanism Lachesis aBFT (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance), which has several key features:

• asynchrony, that is, the ability to process transactions independently by different nodes;
• lack of leaders among the nodes;
• Byzantine stability, which allows you to keep working even if there are up to a third of faulty or malicious nodes;
• high speed of transaction finalization — confirmation occurs within 1-2 seconds.

Each Lachesis node maintains its own local DAG of event blocks containing transactions. Nodes do not send blocks to each other to find consensus, as happens in linear blockchains. Instead, validators periodically exchange transactions and events, synchronizing them within the same epoch, each of which lasts several minutes.

Lachesis is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and can be integrated with the Cosmos SDK. Developers can migrate existing smart contracts and Solidity applications to the Fantom Network in minutes, reducing the cost of releasing new products.

How does the FTM token work?

The base token in the Fantom network is FTM. It circulates in parallel on three blockchains:

• ERC-20 standard token in Ethereum;
• BEP-20 token on Binance Smart Chain;
• native FTM coin in Fantom.

All three tokens are connected by cross-chain bridges Multichain.xyz, AnySwap And SpookySwap for the free movement of liquidity between networks. In addition, users can use the crypto exchange Binancewhich supports FTM I/O on all three networks.

Native FTM tokens can be stored in a wallet PWA Wallet from the Fantom Foundation. Fantom network also support MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet and others.

FTM is designed to pay transaction fees, ensure the operation of validator nodes, and in the future, to manage the project.

Browser is used to track transactions on the Fantom network FTMscansimilar in functionality Etherscan for the Ethereum network.

Transaction fees are directly dependent on network congestion. Taking into account the processing of 600-800 thousand transactions per day, the indicator fluctuates in a wide range – from $0.01 to $0.1.

The Fantom Network uses the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm to validate transactions and secure the network. Transaction processing is provided 59 validators. To run a validator node, you need at least 1 million FTMs, as well as your own server with certain technical specifications or comparable in performance VPS from a cloud provider.

The income of the validator is about 13% per annum. It consists of a reward for processing transactions and 15% of the reward of delegates who have chosen this validator.

Any FTM holder can delegate coins to a specific validator and receive staking rewards. Staking yield proportionately depends from the selected blocking period of FTM tokens: from 4% per annum with the ability to withdraw at any time up to 13% per annum with a blocking period of 365 days.

What partnerships has the Fantom Foundation entered into?

Since its founding in 2018, the Fantom Foundation has been actively working to attract partners around the world to implement blockchain technologies among companies and government agencies.

Initially, the project was aimed at finding partners in South Korea. He entered the ICO with announced partnerships with SoftBank Korea and Oracle Korea. Also, thanks to the Fantom Foundation’s close ties to the Korea Food-Tech Association, early project agreements were with companies in the Korean food technology industry. However, they have not received further development.

In August 2018 Fantom Foundation entered into a strategic partnership with POSBANK, a POS terminal operator, to create a table reservation and delivery platform for 5,000 restaurants in South Korea.

In October 2019 Fantom Foundation began to cooperate with the Danish company Danfoss, specializing in the production of equipment for building engineering systems and renewable energy. The agreement concerned the testing of distributed ledger technology for the IoT infrastructure.

In 2020, the Fantom Foundation actively developed cooperation with the government of Afghanistan in several areas at once. In particular, together with the Ministry of Industry and Trade planned to create a blockchain platform for digitizing archives and transferring the document flow of the institution and the register of local enterprises to the blockchain. With the local Ministry of Health and startup Chekkit was launched a pilot program to track the supply chain of medicines. However rise to power of radical Islamists crossed out all the achievements of the Fantom Foundation in this country.

In April 2021, the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies of Tajikistan concluded an agreement with the Fantom Foundation on using its blockchain solutions to operate the e-government infrastructure. In September 2021, the Fantom Foundation announced a partnership with one of the oldest banks in Tajikistan, Orienbank, to develop a national digital currency (CBDC).

Same month Fantom Foundation in Pakistan signed an agreement on the launch of a pilot project to implement distributed ledger software to optimize the work of the Punjab State Prisons Authority.

In April 2021 Fantom Foundation received additional investment in the amount of $15 million from HyperChain Capital, which previously participated in the first private round in 2018.

How is the Fantom ecosystem evolving?

The Fantom Foundation has achieved the greatest success in the development of an ecosystem of decentralized applications. The active growth of Fantom popularity among DeFi developers began in the spring of 2021. By autumn already several dozen blockchain projectsincluding Aave, curve, C.REAM, yEarnused the network.

The explosive growth of the ecosystem was made possible by two factors: the launch of cross-chain bridges for liquidity migration from the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain networks, and the Fantom Foundation campaign to support and incentivize developers.

June 2021 first grant program launchedwhich involved nine projects, including SpookySwap And spiritswap.

In August 2021 Fantom Foundation announced the launch a new incentive program for DeFi service development teams. For this purpose, 370 million FTM were allocated, which at that time was about $300 million. Depending on the amount of funds blocked, projects receive a reward ranging from 1 million FTM to 12 million FTM. Funds are issued in equal installments on a monthly basis throughout the year and can be spent for any purpose. In October 2021, the incentive program was expanded for projects in the field of GameFi.

Soon after the start of the program, the number of DeFi projects based on Fantom began to grow rapidly. Cumulative TVL in October 2021 exceeded the $5 billion markwhich brought the ecosystem into the top ten.

In October 2021 the company True USD announced using the Fantom network to issue a TUSD stablecoin fully backed by the US dollar.

The Fantom Foundation plans to launch a new Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM) in early 2022 to achieve higher performance and security while maintaining full compatibility with Ethereum smart contracts. FVM is being developed in collaboration with Yense University and the University of Sydney.

Links:

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