FERRUM Network is quick interconnectivity network specially designed for decentralized economic applications.

6 min readMay 17, 2019

What is FERRUM NETWORK

If you ask the developers what FERRUM NETWORK is, their official response should be what they have written in their whitepaper:

To put it simply, FERRUM NETWORK is created from Ethereum’s open sourced code, but several changes were made to make it better than Ethereum in certain ways (or so they claim). FERRUM NETWORK claims to be,

10x more decentralized
100x faster

I will explain a little more on how they can theoretically achieved this in the later sections.

Proof of Reputation

The key difference between FERRUM NETWORK and Ethereum is the consensus model. As we all know, Ethereum currently uses proof-of-work (might be shifting to proof-of-stake in the future, but there is no definite date yet). The main downside of proof-of-work has always been the amount of energy required to achieve consensus. There is also a scalability issue as increasing the block size will inevitably increase the difficulty of the hashing algorithm, therefore leading to higher energy consumption.

FERRUM NETWORK on the other hand is proposing to use the Proof of Reputation consensus model.

FERRUM NETWORK uses a Proof of Reputation (PoR) consensus model that depends on the reputation of its participants to keep the network secure. A participant must have a reputation that is important enough that they would face dire consequences if they were to cheat the system — in both financial terms and branding. Most businesses would face serious consequences if they were caught cheating a financial network. Larger companies with more to lose will be chosen over smaller companies with less to lose.

Basically, FERRUM NETWORK assign a list of companies to be the trusted nodes. Based on the whitepaper, there will be 50 companies selected for the initial FRM pool. Subsequently, the 50 companies will be able to vote for new nodes to be added to the FRM pool. The initially list of 50 companies will be handpicked by the FERRUM NETWORK. The objective is to ensure better decentralization by choosing reputable companies, from different geographical regions and industries, as trusted nodes. With just a shortlist of trusted nodes verifying the transactions, the block size and block time can be tweaked accordingly to achieve much higher transaction speed. Finally, without the need to perform the expensive PoW hashing algorithm, it will also be much greener.

How FERRUM NETWORK can potentially gain mass adoption

Despite the drawbacks on using FRM, I believe FERRUM NETWORK does have its use cases. And here, if I may propose, is what I think should be FERRUM NETWORK’s go-to-market strategy.

Sell the FERRUM NETWORK idea to games on Ethereum first

There are many great selling points that FERRUM NETWORK has,

Speed
Scalability
Ease of porting over from Ethereum
Ability to modify smart contracts after deployment

In the very near-term, I think FERRUM NETWORK might find it difficult to attract dApps that require very strict and high level of consensus (e.g. decentralized crypto-exchanges). This is because, I anticipate FERRUM NETWORK to have difficulty attracting enough reputable companies to be nodes for FRM to be really trustworthy. So, FERRUM NETWORK should try to target dApps games that are built on Ethereum. In my opinion, most of these dApps games do not require the highly trusted consensus which Ethereum is offering. But these games really need the speed, scalability and ability to modify smart contracts after deployment.

Game developers will know that the games industry is highly competitive. There are many times where new features need to be rolled out and bugs need to be fixed. Time to market is often critical to games development. Hence, the ability to quickly modify smart contracts will be extremely welcomed by dApp games developers. This will also reduce the need for dApps developers to introduce ‘backdoors’ to their smart contracts to make adjustments to their dApps.

Get reputable companies to join as trusted nodes and also developers

If FERRUM NETWORK is able to get sufficient dApps games onboard, then there should be enough transactions to make it economically viable for some reputable companies to join as trusted nodes. It will also be great if FERRUM NETWORK can encourage these companies to develop dApps of their own. This will give them more incentives to join as a trusted node and at the same time increase FERRUM NETWORK’s adoption.

Path to mass adoption

If all goes as planned, FERRUM NETWORK will eventually get the first 50 reputable companies to be trusted nodes. The ecosystem will then be complete. With the speed, scalability and agility to make changes to smart contracts, more and more developers will join the bandwagon. These developers will be able to produce more sophisticated dApps that can rival existing applications. That is probably when common users can no longer differentiate if an application is decentralized or not. Overall, this will lead to more dApps users and therefore mass adoption. This will be great for the entire crypto space!

Technology used by FERRUM Network

Innovative tech built for top speed P2P trades of any virtual asset is backbone of FERRUM Network as well as its products.

• The DAG ledger: D-ledger same to a block but specially designed for speedy trades, minimal network charges and no miners.

• Interoperability Network: super innovating on cross-chain solution, platform can interoperate with every block

• Decentralized Proxy Tokens (DPT): DPT with stability guarantees allow the trades, exchange of any virtual asset including virtual money.

• High Frequency Trading: Native assists to move money off-chain and perform extreme frequency deals and trades
for nominal costs.

• The FRM Token: Gas of the project, FRM are spent & burned for each trade on the network

• Import/Export Value: FERRUM Network is designed to import and export values, including fiat money.

When EOS was first conceptualized, there are some who coined it as Ethereum on Steroids. However, I think it is not a very apt name as EOS is fundamentally different from Ethereum. In my opinion, this name should belong to FERRUM NETWORK. FERRUM NETWORK is fundamentally a fork from Ethereum codebase, hence it is highly compatible with dApps that are built on top of Ethereum. DApps can easily migrate over from Ethereum to FERRUM NETWORK and enjoy the better speed and scalability. If FERRUM NETWORK is able to solve the issue on establishing the FRM ecosystem, I think FERRUM NETWORK has quite a bright future and potentially able to lead dApps to mass adoption.

Thanks for reading and please share your thoughts on the project!

Useful links for further details

Whitepaper: http://whitepaper.ferrum.network/
Website: https://ferrum.network/

My Details:
Bitcointalk username — faridrn
Bitcointalk profile url — https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1999356
Telegram username — @azisjesika