What is the Fantom (FTM) blockchain project?

Fantom is a high-performance platform for smart contracts and decentralized applications that is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology used by Fantom enables scalability and faster transaction speeds by processing transfers simultaneously across different nodes. Additionally, Fantom's smart contracts are built on the Solidity programming language, which is the same as Ethereum, Polygon, and BSC.

The project was founded by Ahn Byung Ik, a South Korean mobile application developer. In early 2018, Ahn founded the company Fantom Foundation Ltd, which was registered in South Korea. Later, the company changed its jurisdiction to the Cayman Islands, and the team composition changed significantly. Michael Kong, an Australian IT industry figure, became CEO, and Andre Cronje, who had previously developed the Yearn Finance project, became chief developer.

The Fantom network is developed in Rust, Golang, and Java. The test network was launched in December 2018, and the main network has been operational since December 27, 2019.

According to Crunchbase, Fantom Foundation has raised $40 million in three rounds of investment. The largest venture capital funds that have invested in the project are Hyperchain Capital, Nirvana Venture Advisors, Obsidian Capital, Signum Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, and others. In an additional ICO on April 1, 2018, FTM tokens were sold for $100,000. The main funds were ORCAS and Block Crafters Capital.

In fact, DAG is not an innovation in the blockchain industry. Projects such as Nano, Dero, Ioti, Coti, and some others already use this technology. However, it was Fantom that first combined DAG with Solidity smart contracts.

The consensus algorithm of the Fantom network is Lachesis aBFT (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance). Here are its main characteristics:

● Asynchronicity, which allows transactions to be processed in parallel on multiple nodes;

● Absence of a leadership hierarchy among nodes and validators;

● Byzantine fault tolerance. This mechanism allows the blockchain to continue to work even if a third of the nodes are malicious or faulty;

● High transaction speed. The average processing time for a transaction is 1 second.

In linear blockchains, nodes send each other blocks of information to find consensus. Within a few minutes, Lachesis validators exchange transactions and events to synchronize them.

Fantom is compatible with the EVM, which simplifies cross-chain operations and makes the network flexible for synchronization with other blockchains, such as Polkadot or Cosmos SDK.

FTM is the native cryptocurrency of the Fantom platform. It was initially only used on the network but later a bridge was deployed to transfer some tokens to Ethereum, BSC, Harmony, and Moonriver.

Here are some statistics about FTM:

FTM is used to pay for fees on the network, to support the work of validator nodes and staking (as Lachesis aBFT is a hybrid Proof-of-Stake algorithm). The team is actively developing a DAO to give control of the project to the community and FTM holders in the future.

FTM can be purchased on exchanges such as WhiteBIT, Kraken, Gate, OKX, and many other platforms, including DEX, as the token is also deployed on other networks.

The active phase of Fantom's ecosystem development occurred in 2021, when the blockchain launched cross-chain bridges for interaction with Ethereum and BSC, as well as a number of grant programs for developers. Fantom hosts dozens of DeFi protocols, bridges, lending platforms, NFT, P2E projects, wallets, launchpads, and other dApps.

According to data from the DeFi analytics resource DeFi Lama, the TVL (total value locked) on Fantom exceeds $500 million. The leader in terms of the amount of locked liquidity is the decentralized exchange SpookySwap with a TVL of $110 million.