What is Fantom (FTM)?

Fantom is a high-performance and scalable decentralized platform for smart contracts based on DAG (directed by an acyclical column). It is compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine and supports smart contracts and decentralized applications in Solidity.

Due to the simplicity of migration, fast and cheap transactions on the Fantom network have formed an extensive ecosystem of blockchain projects, including decentralized exchanges, Defi lending and NFT markets.

In the fall of 2021, the Fantom ecosystem included in the top 10 blockchain platforms in terms of blocked funds, and the number of unique addresses on the network exceeded 1 million.

Who and when created fantom?

Fantom Foundation LTD registered in early 2018 in South Korea. The founder and CEO of the project was AN BUST IK, known in his country to create an application for evaluating Siksin restaurants. He is also the president of Korea Food-Tech Association and has close ties with his Alma Mater, the University of Ente, 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, Fantom Foundation replaced the jurisdiction of the Cayman Islands, and the leadership has changed significantly, becoming international. The posts of CEO and IT director were taken by the Australian Michael Cong, and Andre Kronya, known in the Yearn Finance project, became the main Defi developer.

The sowing and two private rounds of investment were held from February to May 2018, during which the project attracted funds of a number of venture funds, including Hyperchain Capital, Signum Capital, Obsidian Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, Bibox Fund, Link VC, NIRAN Crypto and others.

Fantom public tokens in the ICO format was held in June 2018. The project was positioned as “the world’s first smart contract platform based on DAG, which solves the problem of scaling and speed confirmation of transactions”.

According to White Paper, they were going to implement the Fantom platform in various industries, including telecommunications https://gagarin.news/news/new-york-state-to-ban-mining-company-greenidge/, food technologies, finances, logistics, creating smart cities and others.

During private and public tokens, developers sold 40% of 3.175 billion FTM tokens and attracted about $ 39.65 million.

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

The launch of the Fantom test network took place in December 2018, and Mainnet – a year later, December 27, 2019.

Fantom Foundation is currently fully responsible for the development of the project and the network management with the support of the community and validators. In the future, the project management will go into the hands of ftm tokens holders.

How does Fantom blockchain work?

DAG architecture is used by such blockchain projects as Iota, Nano, Dero, Coti and others. However, Fantom for the first time implemented support for smart contracts based on a directed acyclical column.

Fantom technology is based on the Lachesis ABFT (Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism, which has several key features:

• asynchronism, that is, the possibility of processing transactions independently of different nodes;
• lack of leaders among nodes;
• Byzantine stability, which allows to maintain performance even if there are up to a third of faulty or harmful nodes;
• High speed of finalization of transactions-confirmation occurs within 1-2 seconds.

Each Lachesis node stores its own local DAG from blocks of events containing transactions. The nodes do not send a friend to a friend to find a consensus, as is the case in linear blockchains. Instead, validators periodically exchange transactions and events, synchronizing them within the framework of one era, each of which lasts several minutes.

Lachesis is completely compatible with Ethereum (EVM) virtual machine and can be integrated with Cosmos SDK. Developers can carry existing smart contracts and applications on Solidity to the Fantom network in a matter of minutes, reducing the cost of release of new products.

How does FTM token work?

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

• ERC-20 standard token in Ethereum;
• BEP-20 standard token in Binance Smart Chain;
• FTM Native Coin in Fantom.

All three tokens are connected by Multichain cross-bridges.XYZ, ANYSWAP and SPOOKYSWAP for free movement of liquidity between networks. In addition, users can use the Binance crypto -tank, which supports FTM input/output in all three networks.

FTM native FTM tokens can be stored in the PWA Wallet from Fantom Foundation. Fantom is also supported by Metamask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet and others.

FTM is designed to pay for transaction commissions, ensure the operation of validators, and in the future – to manage the project.

To track transactions on the Fantom network, FTMSCAN observer is used, in terms of functionality similar to Etherscan for Ethereum.

Transaction commissions directly depend on the loading of the network. Given the processing of 600-800 thousand transactions per day, the indicator ranges in a wide range-from $ 0.01 to $ 0.1.

The Fantom network uses the Proof-OF-Stake consensus algorithm to check transactions and network protection. Transaction processing is provided by 59 validators. At least 1 million FTM, as well as its own server with certain technical characteristics or comparable to VPS performance from cloud provider, are required to launch the validator.

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

Any owner of FTM can delegate coins to a specific validator and receive a reward for steaking. The profitability of stakeing is proportional to the chosen period of blocking FTM tokens: from 4% per annum with the ability to withdraw to 13% per annum with a blocking period of 365 days.

What partnerships did Fantom Foundation conclude?

Since the founding in 2018, Fantom Foundation has been active in attracting partners around the world to introduce blockchain technologies among companies and state institutions.

Initially, the project was aimed at finding partners in South Korea. At the ICO, he went out with declared partnerships with SoftBank Korea and Oracle Korea. Also, thanks to the close relations of the Fantom Foundation leadership with Korea Food-Tech Association, the project early agreements were related to the company of the Korean Food Technology Industry. However, they did not receive further development.

In August 2018, Fantom Foundation entered into a strategic partnership with Posbank, POS-terminal operator, to create a platform for the order of tables and delivery of orders to 5,000 restaurants of South Korea.

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

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

In April 2021, the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies of Tajikistan entered into an agreement with Fantom Foundation on the use of its blockchain solutions for the operation of the electronic government infrastructure. In September 2021, Fantom Foundation announced partnership with one of the oldest banks of Tajikistan Orienbank for the development of national digital currency (CBDC).

In the same month, Fantom Foundation signed an agreement on the start of a pilot project to implement distributed registers to optimize the work management of Penjab prison.

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

How the fantom ecosystem is developing?

Fantom Foundation has achieved the greatest successes in the development of the ecosystem of decentralized applications. Active growth in the popularity of Fantom among Defi developers began in the spring of 2021. By autumn, several dozen blockchain projects, including AAVE, Curve, with.R.E.A.M, Yearn, used the network.

The explosive growth of the ecosystem has become possible thanks to two factors: launching cross-bridges for migration liquidity from Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain networks, as well as Fantom Foundation for Support and Stimulate Developers.

In June 2021, the first grant program started, in which nine projects took part, including Spookyswap and Spiritswap.

In August 2021, Fantom Foundation announced the start of a new reward program for developers of Defi services. For this purpose, 370 million FTM were 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. The funds are issued in equal shares monthly during the year and can be spent on any purpose. In October 2021, the reward program was expanded for projects in the field of Gamefi.

Soon after the start of the program, a rapid growth in the number of Defi projects based on Fantom began. The total TVL in October 2021 exceeded $ 5 billion, which brought the ecosystem to the top ten largest.

In October 2021, Trueusd announced the use of Fantom network to release TUSD stablecoin with full support of an American dollar.

At the beginning of 2022, Fantom Foundation plans to launch the new Fantom (FVM) virtual machine to achieve higher performance and safety while maintaining complete compatibility with Ethereum smart contracts. FVM development is carried out together with the University of Ente and the Sydney University.