What is Fantom? | ForkLog

What is Fantom?

Fantom is a high performance and scalable decentralized smart contract platform based on DAG (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 the fall of 2021, the Fantom ecosystem entered the top 10 blockchain platforms in terms of the amount of blocked funds, and the number of unique addresses on the network exceeded 1 million…

Who created Fantom and when?

Fantom Foundation Ltd was registered in early 2018 in South Korea. The founder and CEO of the project is An Byung Ik, famous in his country for creating an app for evaluating restaurants SikSin. He is also the President of the Korea Food-Tech Association and has close ties to his alma mater, Yensee University, the oldest in South Korea.

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

Subsequently, the Fantom Foundation changed its jurisdiction to the Cayman Islands, and the management team changed significantly, becoming international. Australian Michael Kong took over as CEO and CIO, and Andre Cronier, known in the community for the yEarn Finance project, became the main DeFi developer.

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

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

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

During private and public token sales, the 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 the future performance of up to 300 thousand TPS, but later the figure was adjusted to 4500 TPS.

The Fantom testnet was launched in December 2018, and the mainnet was launched a year later, on December 27, 2019.

The Fantom Foundation is currently fully responsible for project development 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 such blockchain projects as IOTA, Nano, Dero, Coti and others. However, Fantom is the first to support directed acyclic graph-based smart contracts.

The Fantom technology is based on the Lachesis aBFT (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism, 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 remain operational even in the presence of up to a third of faulty or malicious nodes;
• high speed of finalization of transactions – 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 is the case with 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 Solidity smart contracts and applications to the Fantom network in minutes, reducing the cost of launching new products.

How does the FTM token work?

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

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

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

Native FTM tokens can be stored in the Fantom Foundation’s PWA Wallet. The Fantom network is also supported by MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet and others.

FTM is designed to pay transaction fees, ensure the operation of validator nodes, and, in the long term, for project management.

To track transactions in the Fantom network, the FTMscam browser is used, which is similar in functionality to 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 a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm to validate transactions and secure the network. Transaction processing is provided by 59 validators. To launch a validator node, you need at least 1 million FTM, as well as your own server with certain technical characteristics or a VPS comparable in performance from a cloud provider.

The validator’s income is about 13% per annum. It consists of the reward for processing transactions and 15% of the reward for delegates who choose this validator.

Any FTM holder can delegate coins to a specific validator and receive staking rewards. Staking profitability is proportionally dependent on the selected blocking period for 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 made?

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 went to ICO with announced partnerships with SoftBank Korea and Oracle Korea… Also, due to the close relationship of the Fantom Foundation management with the Korea Food-Tech Association, the early project agreements were with companies in the Korean food technology industry. However, they did not receive further development.

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

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

In 2020, the Fantom Foundation actively developed cooperation with the Afghan government in several areas at once. In particular, together with the Ministry of Industry and Trade, it was 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. A pilot drug supply chain tracking program has been launched with the local Ministry of Health and startup Chekkit. However, the coming to power of radical Islamists canceled all the achievements of the Fantom Foundation in this country.

In April 2021, the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies of Tajikistan entered into an agreement with the Fantom Foundation to use 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).

In the same month, the Fantom Foundation in Pakistan signed an agreement to pilot a distributed ledger software deployment to streamline the Punjab State Prison Authority.

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

How is the Fantom ecosystem evolving?

The Fantom Foundation’s greatest success has been in developing an ecosystem of decentralized applications. Fantom’s strong growth in popularity among DeFi developers began in the spring of 2021. By the fall, several dozen blockchain projects, including Aave, Curve, C.REAM, yEarn, were using the network.

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

In June 2021, the first grant program was launched, in which nine projects participated, including SpookySwap and SpiritSwap.

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

Soon after the start of the program, the number of DeFi projects based on Fantom began to grow rapidly. Aggregate TVL in October 2021 exceeded the $ 5 billion mark, which made the ecosystem one of the ten largest.

In October 2021, TrueUSD announced using the Fantom network to issue a fully US dollar-backed TUSD stablecoin.

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

Links:

Fantom Foundation website

Twitter

Reddit

Github

Official Telegram Channel