FANTOM: HAS THE LORD OF THE BLOCK AWOKEN?
Year by year, new distributed ledgers emerge and strive to deliver appropriate solutions to the existing issues of smart contract platforms so they can become ‘the Ethereum’s successor.’ Fantom, publicly known in 2018, is a worthy opponent with many extraordinary features.
“BACK TO THE FUTURE…”
A time-traveler from 2030 suddenly stood out from a halo-encircled portal right in front of me with a weird device looking like a smartphone in his hand. After his heavy breathes, he came down asking me weird questions: “Can you buy me a coke with your Bitcoin? What is your personal blockchain? I can switch it really fast.” I quickly realized the situation that I was encountering and gave him the correct response: “Nope, my friends. It still can’t be done this year and even if it is possible, it is still far too long and too expensive for just a beverage! So cool that we can have a personal blockchain for payment! Right now, we have just achieved a great milestone where developers come up with such DeFi innovations as food coins!” The time-traveler seemed disappointed. “Oopsies, I was not intended to go back to 2020.” He said. “Let’s go guys. Wrong year!” The man turned around and dashed into the portal then disappeared right before me. Everything happened with a minute!
I hope you all understand the implication in the imaginary story I have just told above. Bitcoin is the most popular blockchain in the world but the scalability and the consensus algorithm have proven that it is now not suitable to be means of payment. Moreover, the nature of Bitcoin source code does not allow the further implementation of autonomously executed computer programs or in other words: smart contracts. Regarding the aspect of the smart contract, Ethereum blockchain has made this an industry standard; however, the boom of world’s first successful DApp — CryptoKitties, “educated” blockchain community on a nightmare called ‘Ethereum congestion’ (when gas fee and pending time of Ethereum go so high). Other major blockchains such as Cardano, Tron, or NEO are developed to enable the operation of smart contracts but they are not used ubiquitously. These obstacles have resulted in the emergence of the new generation of promising technologies that have the potential to provide the solutions that push blockchain industry to the new heights. Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is one of the distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) that were invented and integrated into many projects to serve this purpose. While the transactions in blockchain connect like blocks to be processed, DAG allows the transactions to link directly to each other. DAG also encourages the massive interaction of network participants as the higher number of transactions results in the speedy validations.
FANTOM PROJECT DECODED
Maybe an early concept about Fantom has been formed in your thinking after my explanation of the rising technologies above. Generally, Fantom is a public decentralized platform that does not adopt a blockchain model but utilizes DAG as its backbone, where participants engage in a consensus mechanism called “Lachesis” (or asynchronous byzantine fault-tolerant Proof-of-Stake) and autonomous programs can be deployed. To simply put, this means Fantom is a network of blockchains, but all of them have the same consensus algorithm.
The project was launched to become an alternative to the popular blockchains, bringing individuals and enterprises a smart-contract environment with outstanding performance, scalability, smooth customization, and security. Consequently, Fantom would be broadly applied in multiple industry verticals around the world for real-time transactions, DApps, and data sharing.
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES
There are numerous reasons to choose Fantom over the other blockchains and the flippening mentioned above will come into reality.
The first thing to discuss is its scalability. The platform is built to handle hundreds of thousands of transactions despite the complexity of DApps and tremendous concurrent activities. By putting each application into a different blockchain owning separated tokens, tokenomics, and governance rules but the same uber-fast Lachesis consensus, “all transactions are created equal” (almost), and confirmation time, as well as fees(usually a nightmare), plummet drastically. This is considered to be a great encouragement for the migration of DApps from other distributed ledgers to Fantom. While users can skip choosing between waiting so long and paying network fees so much, the developers enjoy smooth operation with high satisfaction from the customers.
Fantom’s creators also desire to attract the community by the modularity which enables efficient DApps migration and deployment. They regard Ethereum as the most important environment for the DApps so Opera mainnet, a blockchain on Fantom, was built to be compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Developers utilizing Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM) can run DApps on both blockchains. Users may prefer the one with fast performance and low fees.
Besides, all blockchains on Fantom network are plugged into the aBFT Proof-of-Stake algorithm consensus Lachesis to enhance their security and lower electricity consumption affections to the environment. Lachesis protects the internal networks of Fantom through the participation of a big number of peer nodes that ensure leaderlessness. A network consisting of numerous nodes like Fantom absolutely protect transactions from reversion.
Transparent and permissionless manners are also the most pressing matters to choose Fantom. Anyone can check the source code of Fantom right on Github at any time. Additionally, anyone who owns at least 3,175,000 FTM can become a validator node to secure the network. This activity is available to the one holding a humble amount or having much knowledge of the industry. Fantom is built in a way that we still can get rewards even if we join the delegation with only 1 FTM.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
As Fantom was born recently; therefore, only a few DApps are available to be reviewed but I will try to give my feedbacks as accurately as possible.
I started by creating an individual Fantom web wallet (https://fantom.foundation/ftm-wallet) finding out that the process is simply basic. When using the private credentials to get into the wallet interface, I have to say it is one of the most user-friendly asset storage I have ever used. It would take beginner users a couple of minutes to master the UX. They can instantly monitor the amounts of assets they are holdings and all the transactions carried out relating to the wallet. Furthermore, users can send, receive, do DeFi, or participate in governance with only a few clicks.
How about the confirmation time? Amazing! Fantom is the first distributed ledger that can deliver transactions almost instantly within one or two seconds (I swear they were processed right when I switch to Txid tabs). This stay the same even though a batch of 50 transactions is processed believe this is the magic of DAG where transactions are now organized as chains of blocks but asynchronous dots. On the other hand, the average transaction fee is sub 0.001 FTM ($0,030713 USD/FTM) which is acceptable now. However, once the number of concurrent active participants increases, or FTM moon, what would happen? I would leave the answer for the future. Transaction speed can be checked via https://speedtx.fantom.rocks/ (single transactions) and https://supercharge.fantom.rocks/ (bulk transactions).
Lately, in October 2020, Fantom has introduced its very first Decentralized Finance applications. Being run on a DAG modeled smart contract platform powered by aBFT consensus, the DeFi activities operate in a less amount of time but more reliably and securely than the blockchains of the older generations. You will be able to interact easily with synthetic assets by buying, selling, borrowing, or lending them, to gain profits from your all assets. It all starts when you create your own wallet at https://pwawallet.fantom.network/ and carry out actions. The only three newly released functions are fMint, fSwap, and fUNI. With fSwap, you can trade between FTM and synthetic assets such as fUSD. Whereas, users are allowed to mint fUSD by locking their wFTM on the network. wFTM can be obtained by using FTM-wFTM trading pair on fSwap. Thirdly, fUNI, a Fantom based Uniswap (a famous Autonomous Market Maker on Ethereum), let user trade, add, or remove liquidity for assets on Fantom at a glance without much expense. fLend is also a DeFi feature; however, it is not available to use right now.
In case you want to explore more DApps, you may want to access a fanmade link here: https://fantom.rocks/. Regular checks on the website as well as social media will let you know once they are available to the public.
CONCLUSION
The idea of a DAG-based smart contract is so brilliant that Fantom has much potential to become a new land for developers and users to migrate. If they can address the adoption issue and the related ones, the future of Fantom is certainly bright! What do you think about Fantom? Please share your opinion below.
#FTMtothemoon $FTM
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*All the information in this article is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency is a highly volatile market so please do your own research before any investment.
