FANTOM: A Shining Light in Korea’s Technology Disruption

A decidedly revolutionary technology — blockchain — has seen a meteoric rise in popularity in recent years. The inception of Bitcoin in 2009 has brought forth a mania over blockchain-enabled ventures, and many proposed solutions to the problems of this world have arisen with the backing of this form of distributed ledger technology.

Despite their popularity, blockchain platforms have struggled to achieve mainstream adoption due to technological limitations — as seen by network congestion, rising transaction costs, and slow network confirmation times on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Whereas most industry experts are participating in an arms race to scale blockchain technology, a small subset of academics is proposing an alternative to blockchain technology, Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) such as IOTA, NANO, and Hedera Hashgraph have been proposed by these experts to be the successor to blockchain technology.

The most prominent characteristic that distinguishes a DAG based platform from traditional blockchain technology is the absence of miners and mineable blocks. Mining has proven to be an effective way to keep Bitcoin and Ethereum decentralized, but as the network grows larger it has been evident that the amount of time needed for consensus finality and energy consumption have become a drastic bottleneck to the real time use and mainstream adoption of blockchain technology. While it currently takes around 15–20 minutes to mine a block on existing platforms, DAG based platforms propose near instant finality and lofty promises of high transaction throughput.

The simplified visualisation of DAG architecture in comparison to blockchain technology is shown below.

The red lines represent the confirmation ‘links’ between the new transaction and the previous transactions. As a result, DAG can achieve much higher throughput than a traditional blockchain by avoiding issues with block size and slow network confirmation.

Currently, there are several projects that have risen to prominence in the cryptocurrency space which use a form of DAG to process transactions, including IOTA, IoT Chain, and Byteball. However, a highly experienced team team has brought to light an innovative new solution that integrates smart contracts with DAG technology.

Enter FANTOM

Based in South Korea, an emerging hub in the blockchain industry, FANTOM is the world’s first DAG-based smart contract platform. Approximately $40 Mil USD was raised to fund the development of FANTOM’s platform.

In its current stage of development, FANTOM utilizes advanced DAG technology to enable negligible transaction fees and control the width of the network for efficient transaction validation, while establishing military-grade security.

Stelian Balta, founder of Hyperchain Capital, a digital assets fund headquartered in Singapore, has stated “more so than any other project currently out there, FANTOM has the credible potential to bridge the gap between existing blockchain innovation and the mainstream user adoption, which is needed to bring cryptocurrency usage into the economics of daily life”.

So how does the platform manage to accomplish this level of output and security?

Platform Architecture

The development team behind FANTOM has been building an unconventional but very efficient model known as the Opera Chain. The Opera Chain is the main component and works to confirm one transaction at a time without rights to modify any of the previously approved purchases.

• OPERA WARE layer-confirm the first transaction, before sending it to the next layer.
• Opera Core Layer-as the layer with nodes, the core works to ensure transaction confirmation is separate.
• The Lachesis Protocol enables a consensus system for the decentralized FANTOM network.
• Story Data functions to store data segments for tracking and the supply-chain management.

In addition, the Opera Chain will not only secure and speed-up transactions above 300,000 TPS, but will also provide an open-source and permissionless platform.

FantomPay

The development team is preparing a payment processor, FantomPay that is planned to be integrated on top of the mainnet of the FANTOM platform.

FantomPay is currently undergoing testing with Pos Bank, one of Korea’s largest point of sale solutions providers, and Siksin, a partner and member of The Korean Food-Tech Association. Fantom Pay, in addition to being a potential rival to major payment gateways, is an excellent demonstration of the versatility of the DAG-based platform that FANTOM is build on, and the first of many use cases for the technology.

The Team

The FANTOM team spans a diverse range of backgrounds, including finance, food tech, and cryptocurrency.

Dr. Ahn Byung Ik is the CEO. Having received his Ph.D in computer science from one of Korea’s top universities, he founded a popular food-tech application SikSin, which has evolved to one of Korea’s top food-tech platforms with more than 2 million monthly users. He is currently the president of the Korea Food-Tech Association.

Sang Min is the head DAG architect. He is a postdoctoral researcher at Yonsei University, where he also received his Ph.D in computer science. His areas of expertise are research and development of DAG and blockchain algorithms.

Jake Choi is the CMO. He works for DCH, which has one of the only regulate crypto funds in the world, and has subsequently been involved with other major projects in the cryptocurrency space. He holds a degree in Finance and Quantitative Analytics from the University of Sydney.

Partnerships

In addition to its experienced and talented team, FANTOM has collaborated with several high tier strategic partners.

Bibox, one of the ten largest cryptocurrency exchanges by volume, is an investor in FANTOM and will be the first to list the token (FTM). Since its founding in 2017, Bibox has established itself as one of the largest exchanges transacting over $1bn dollars worth of weekly volume.

Oracle Korea, a partner of FANTOM, is one of the largest software companies in the world. US parent company Oracle has close to $40bn of annual revenues and is widely recognised for its database franchise.

Softbank is one of the largest companies in Japan and is ranked in the top 40 of the Forbes Global 2,000 list of the world’s largest publicly traded companies. Softbank Commerce Korea (SBCK) has partnered with FANTOM.

The Korean Food-Tech Association, has partnered with FANTOM. The association contains some of the largest food companies in Korea.

Arias Capital Group is an investment, research and advisory firm in the digital assets space. Our globally-based team is comprised of seasoned finance professionals, traders, marketers, developers, PR personnel and researchers. Our team undertake extensive due diligence across the blockchain space with interest in the long term standing of the teams and technologies.

Disclaimer: Please note this article is not investment advice and should not be construed as such. Cryptocurrencies are a high risk investment and may not be suitable to all investors’ risk profiles. Seeking advice from a certified finance professional before undertaking any investment is strongly advised.