Written by: Daniel Li
In the current cryptocurrency market, the old altcoin FTM has once again attracted the attention of investors. What’s particularly striking is that in March alone, FTM’s price exploded by 150%. What’s even more surprising is that even in the most recent week, when Bitcoin and Ethereum pulled back due to Japan’s interest rate hikes and the entire market fell, FTM still bucked the trend and rose by 30%. Such an astonishing performance not only excited investors, but also deepened the market's attention to the potential of FTM.
There are several reasons why FTM has been able to rise again. First, the strong publicity and promotion by Andre Cronje (AC), director of the Fantom Foundation, has injected new vitality and confidence into Fantom, and restored people's confidence in the prospects of the old project Fantom. Secondly, the market has positive expectations for the upcoming Fantom Sonic. AC said that Sonic will surpass the "parallel EVM" and trigger a subversive revolution. This statement further strengthened investors' confidence in FTM. This wave of FTM's rise may have just begun.
01 The old public chain Fantom rises again
Fantom was originally founded by computer scientist Ahn Byung in January 2018 and was later taken over by Michael Kong, a developer of smart contracts on Ethereum. The original intention of this project was to overcome the limitations faced by previous generation blockchains and achieve a balance between the three core characteristics of scalability, security and decentralization.
In September 2018, AndreCronje joined Fantom as a DeFi architect and later became a director of the Fantom Foundation. As a leader in the last DeFi craze, AC created star projects such as Yearn Finance and Phantom, and is a prolific contributor to many important projects such as Keep3r Network, Multichain, Chainlist, Solidly and Bribe crv Finance.
The joining of AC has made a huge contribution to Fantom's technological breakthroughs, especially in promoting Fantom's multi-chain work. Fantom uses the advanced aBFT (Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism Lachesis driver based on an improved version of DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), which allows different blockchains to exist asynchronously without slowing down the main network. In addition, Lachesis enables transactions to be completed almost instantly and is resistant to malicious behavior by up to one-third of the network’s participants. This mechanism makes Fantom faster, cheaper, and more secure than previous technologies, solving the blockchain trilemma that has long been insurmountable by many Layer 1s.
In 2019, Fantom released the first-generation EVM-compatible Opera mainnet, which provides complete smart contract support through Solidity and EVM, allowing any Ethereum-based DApp to be seamlessly migrated to Fantom. Thanks to its modular architecture, Fantom is also able to offer fully customized blockchains for digital assets, with different features tailored to specific use cases. Therefore, during the period when Fantom Opera was launched, Fantom attracted widespread attention from the market and was even widely regarded as the "Ethereum killer".
In March 2022, there were rumors that AndreCronje and another collaborator Anton Nell would leave the DeFi industry and suspend about 25 applications and services, including Fantom. Although the Fantom Foundation issued a statement afterwards, Andre Cronje did not completely leave the DeFi industry and only turned to providing technical support behind the scenes. However, this incident had a huge impact on FTM tokens. Coupled with the entire crypto industry entering a bear market, the FTM token price fell from a peak of $3.0 to $0.19 and has been hovering below $0.6 for as long as two years. It wasn’t until the beginning of this year that Andre Cronje frequently released news about Fantom’s ecological progress, rekindling investors’ enthusiasm.
FTM has soared by nearly 200% since the beginning of the year. This growth is partly due to the active promotion of Andre Cronje, who even used Meme to promote Fantom, saying that FantomSonic will bring better efficiency than the parallel EVM path. Despite being questioned by some new public chains, Fantom has attracted great attention in a short period of time. At the same time, Fantom, which has been silent for two years, has also made great breakthroughs in the field of technology. The Fantom Foundation announced that it will launch the latest technology upgrade Fantom Sonic this year. AC has high hopes for this, saying that it is expected to surpass the existing "parallel EVM" and trigger a subversive revolution.
02 What is Fantom Sonic?
Fantom Sonic is the latest technological upgrade of the Fantom network, designed to increase the scale and performance of the network. As early as October 2023, the Fantom Foundation announced the launch of the Fantom Sonic program. This important technological advancement has attracted widespread attention and is considered a long-awaited milestone for the Fantom community and the DeFi ecosystem.
Fantom Sonic introduces a series of innovative technologies and optimization solutions to further enhance the performance and functionality of the Fantom Network.
1. Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM): Fantom Sonic introduces a new virtual machine, the FVM. Compared with the previous EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), FVM provides a more efficient smart contract execution environment, greatly speeding up the deployment and execution of contracts. This improvement allows developers to build and deploy smart contracts more efficiently, while users can conduct transaction operations more quickly. Fantom Sonic brings smart contract development and execution efficiency to a new level.
2. Carmen Library: FantomSonic has enhanced the network’s data storage capabilities by introducing a new data storage solution called Carmen. Through Carmen, Fantom Sonic successfully reduced storage requirements by 90%, reducing the amount of data recorded by the validator node from 2,000 GB to 300 GB, and reducing the amount of data recorded by the Archive Node from 11 TB. The above is reduced to less than 1 TB. This technological innovation enables Fantom Network to efficiently handle larger-scale data and provides developers and users with more efficient data management capabilities.
3. Lachesis consensus mechanism: FantomSonic adopts the Lachesis consensus algorithm as the basis of its consensus mechanism. Lachesis is a leaderless asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (aBFT) consensus mechanism that has been further optimized in the Sonic upgrade. By reducing information redundancy and improving decision-making efficiency, Fantom Sonic accelerates the transaction confirmation process and improves the network's throughput and performance. This optimization allows the Fantom network to handle more transactions and achieve lower transaction latency while ensuring security.
4. High throughput and low latency: FantomSonic’s theoretical transaction limit is more than 2,000 transactions per second, with an average finalization time of only one second. This enables the Fantom network to process more transactions and achieve fast transaction confirmations, providing users with a smoother and more efficient trading experience. High throughput and low latency are important breakthroughs in performance of Fantom Sonic, providing users with better transaction efficiency and experience.
5. Smooth upgrade: FantomSonic, as the next generation iteration of the Fantom network, is fully compatible with the existing smart contracts, services, and tools on FantomOpera. This means that existing applications and contracts can continue to run on the Fantom network without major modifications. This smooth upgrade feature helps reduce the risks during the upgrade process and provides better compatibility and stability for developers and users. Fantom Sonic's smooth upgrade mechanism also provides better protection and support for the sustainable development of the ecosystem.
The release of Sonic marks the beginning of a new chapter for Fantom. After the upgrade, Fantom not only has fork-free upgrades, true parallel transactions, top TPS and finality, but also has a series of outstanding features such as being able to reduce 90% of the requirements for local smart contract wallets and data storage, making it different from other Advanced platform for layer1 chains.
Today, Fantom’s fate is no longer just about survival, but about how it captures market share from other layer 1 protocols and translates that into price action for the FTM token. Although Fantom's current market value is only $3 billion, with the development of Fantom Sonic, Fantom's future value is undoubtedly worth looking forward to.
Fantom ecosystem DeFi occupies half of the market, and Sonic helps it to reach a higher level.
In this bull market, the Meme currency ecology has become a battleground for public chains. In the early stage of the bull market, Solana relied on the popularity of Bonk to maintain the Solana ecology and the confidence of SOL holders, allowing Solana to truly recover. Therefore, some Fantom community members also hope that Fantom can use the Meme coin craze to achieve an ecological explosion. The Fantom Foundation also retweeted an introduction to the Meme about $sGOAT. $sGOAT has become the Meme coin with the most holders on Fantom (more than 1,000 holders) in just one day since it went online.
However, promoting the development of Meme ecology is not necessarily suitable for the current Fantom ecology. The explosion of Meme coins often represents the result of ecological prosperity. Although the number of Fantom ecological projects has exceeded 250, its ecology is not active, according to tokenterminal data. , Fantom’s average daily active users in the past month is about 50,000. Overall, there is still a big gap between the ecological activity and public chains such as Ethereum and Solana. Therefore, it is currently unrealistic to rely on Meme to drive user growth in the Fantom ecosystem. Fantom needs to find a development method that suits itself.
In the "Fantom 2024 First Quarter Overview", in addition to explaining Fantom's various performance advantages in detail, it also compared it with its competitor Solana. Solana unabashedly prioritizes network speed and low transaction costs, which also leads to its The security has been questioned. Since 2021, Solana has been shut down many times due to serious errors. In contrast, Fantom experienced only one network outage, which was rectified within seven hours without any loss of funds.
Currently, among the 254 ecological projects listed by Fantom, there are 118 Defi projects, accounting for nearly half of the number. Therefore, prioritizing the development of the Defi ecosystem is more important for Fantom than promoting the development of the Meme ecosystem. On March 28, Fantom announced the progress of a new round of financing for sonic. The first angel investor to participate was the founder of FraxFinance. The cooperation with Frax may find some new paths for Fantom’s Defi revival.
The Fantom Foundation also has high hopes for Sonic’s development in the DeFi field. According to a report by "The Block", Fantom Foundation CEO Michael Kong said that Sonic will launch a series of plans in the future, including supporting liquidity staking tokens, establishing a new staking mechanism and a more decentralized and secure cross-chain Solution that enables users to bridge funds from Ethereum to enhance DeFi activity on Fantom.
Kong said: “Sonic will be used to create a new first-class shared sequencer for L1 and L2 chains, capable of processing more than 180 million transactions per day with true sub-second confirmation times, and with a new community-centric brand as the basis for relaunching Fantom."
03 Fantom Sonic ecological project inventory
The success of a public chain lies not only in its strong technical advantages, but also in the development of ecological projects. In order to attract more high-quality projects to join the Fantom ecosystem, the Fantom Foundation established an incubator called Sonic Labs in December last year. The incubator is officially supported and invests huge resources and technology to support developers in building new projects.
The recently announced Sonic Labs Startup Accelerator Program winning projects also demonstrate the appeal and vitality of the Fantom ecosystem. These projects cover innovation in multiple fields, including sustainable DEX (decentralized exchange), social protocols, P2P lending platforms, green technology start-ups, and RPG chain games. The addition of these projects will further enrich the Fantom ecosystem, provide users with more application scenarios and services, and open up more choices and opportunities.
Sustainable DEX project Lynx
Lynx is an advanced decentralized perpetual exchange that allows any protocol, DAO or blockchain to conveniently list tokens as their collateral assets. On the Lynx platform, users can invest in various tokens without selling their own assets, allowing them to invest in other assets.
Lynx has multiple advantages: users can use any listed collateral token to conduct perpetual contract transactions without worrying about price fluctuations affecting the health of the position; transactions do not require gas fees or holding the chain’s native tokens, ensuring gas cost-free transactions . In addition, Lynx’s cross-chain system allows users to interact with perpetual exchanges on any source chain on the Lynx platform and conduct settlement on Lynx’s engine chain. In the future, Lynx will be connected to the latest Fantom Sonic mainnet, providing it with faster block production rates, low gas prices, and all the infrastructure that meets the needs of sustainable trading applications.
Social Protocol Thunder Dome
Thunder Dome is a full-stack social finance (Fi) service built on the Fantom blockchain, aiming to provide users with a way to interact with the community, through tickets. These tickets are tradable social tokens that allow users to communicate and interact in communities centered on individuals, groups, or topics. The emergence of Thunder Dome marks the evolution of social finance from individual-focused social finance to a broader scope that includes groups and topics.
In Thunder Dome, users can buy tickets to participate in different types of communities and build connections in them. In addition, users can also realize income through Thunder Dome. Holders of individual tickets can get 5% profit of the transaction amount, while holders of group tickets and theme tickets share 5% of the transaction volume in proportion to their holdings. Currently, Thunder Dome has been successfully running on the Fantom Sonic testnet and is scheduled to be launched on the mainnet when the Sonic mainnet is released.
P2P lending platform Debita
Debita is a P2P oracle-less lending protocol on Fantom that aims to provide a decentralized lending solution. As part of the Fantom ecosystem, Debita provides lending capabilities to users and developers, driving the development and growth of the ecosystem.
The Debita platform offers a range of unique and attractive features such as fair interest rates and tokenizing loan positions. At the same time, Debita, built on the Fantom blockchain, ensures the security and transparency of transactions while eliminating the risk of liquidation due to collateral devaluation. In addition, Debita welcomes participation from a wide range of borrowers and lenders, simplifying the process of finding suitable financing options and providing customized solutions to meet the unique needs of each user, providing flexibility and adaptability.
Green Tech Startup KiriCoin
KiriCoin is a green tech startup focused on tracking and rewarding individuals for sustainable behavior to combat climate change. Although KiriCoin has been relatively scarce, its award from Sonic Labs shows that the project is highly recognized. By combining Fantom’s advanced technology with KiriCoin’s sustainable development philosophy, we can foresee that in the future, this project will play an important role in promoting a more environmentally friendly and sustainable world.
RPG chain game Froqorion
Froqorion is an incubation project of Sonic Labs, a subsidiary of the Fantom Foundation, and is an innovative game in the Fantom ecosystem. The background of the game is set in an ancient frog civilization called Froqorion, and players will become the heroic characters of this civilization. The game uses a squad-based RPG gameplay. Players' goal is to collect the four elemental powers (earth, wind, fire, and water) and form a squad to complete various tasks and adventures through cooperation.
As part of the Fantom ecosystem, Froqorion also provides some functions and mechanisms related to the Fantom blockchain, such as token incentives, etc. Overall, Froqorion is an innovative RPG blockchain game project based on the Fantom blockchain, which brings new application scenarios and gameplay to the Fantom ecosystem, combines the frog civilization background and squad-based RPG elements, and provides players with an interesting and unique gaming experience.
04 Summary
After the Cancun upgrade, the market's focus has been on solving the scalability of blockchain through layer2, and the emergence of Sonic has also provided people with a new idea. Sonic is Fantom's most scalable and With secure blockchain technology, its transaction processing speed reaches a true 2,000TPS, achieving sub-second performance. This performance index has exceeded most solutions based on Layer 2. This also shows that Layer 1 public chains can also improve scalability through their own technological innovation, and do not necessarily need to rely on Layer 2.
Fantom may not be the most high-profile project in this bull market, but it's certainly the most anticipated. With the return of AC, the upgrade of Sonic, and the recovery of the Defi ecosystem, Fantom may be expected to rise again in this bull market.
