DeFi Decrypted: Fantom and FTM explained — AAX Academy

Fantom is another third-generation decentralized finance project with ambitious plans, offering an all-in-one suite of DeFi products together with development tools for building. The project has been highlighted often in crypto media recently, following adoption of its mainnet Opera Chain and a long string of partnerships and integrations including Chainlink, Ontology, Royal Star Pharma, and the Afghanistan government.

What is Fantom?

Fantom is what DeFi needs to enter its new growth chapter. It is a one-stop solution for blockchain developers who want to build dApps based on fast and secure protocols. Fantom Opera Chain is the Fantom mainnet, facilitating staking services and Ethereum Virtual Machine support. Opera was created to overcome the shortcomings of older blockchains, focusing on sustainable scalability to achieve future growth while also making it easy to port dApps currently based on Ethereum.

Any developer can build dApps using Opera, as it is fully open-source and permissionless, with the familiar Ethereum programming Solidity offering full smart contract support. Powered by the novel Lachesis aBFT consensus mechanism, Opera can host real-world applications with minimal risk of network congestion or high gas fees.

As the team claims, Fantom has many advantages over competing blockchains:

• Very low cost: the average transaction fee comes down to $0.0000001 per transaction
• Security: the Proof-of-Stake network of Fantom’s validator nodes secure the network in a leaderless, decentralized, and trustless way. As the network grows, it becomes more secure through increased decentralization making attacks difficult and unprofitable.
• Scalability: the Fantom protocol can seamlessly scale to thousands of nodes, without compromising the privacy or security of the network.

The Fantom experience

Fantom Finance offers a suite of dApps with near-instant transaction finality and almost zero fees. The four main products in its DeFi suite include:

• fMint: You can mint dozens of synthetic assets, including cryptocurrencies, national currencies, and commodities.
• fLend: Lend and borrow digital assets to trade and to earn interests without losing exposure to your FTM.
• fTrade: Trade Fantom-based digital assets without leaving your wallet. Fully non-custodial and decentralized AMM exchange.
• Liquid Staking: Fantom offers users the ability to lock up their FTM tokens, and mint sFTM tokens (staked FTM) at a 1:1 ratio. These tokens are ‘liquid’ and can be used across different protocols within the Fantom ecosystem.

The FTM token

FTM is the primary token on the Fantom network, serving a variety of purposes.

To secure the network, validator nodes need to hold a minimum of 3,175,000 FTM, and stakers need to lock up their FTM. In return for the service, both the nodes and the stakers are rewarded with epoch rewards and fees. Because Fantom is a fully permissionless and leaderless decentralized ecosystem, any decision regarding the network is carried out by on-chain governance. To participate in the voting process, FTM tokens are required. Lastly, FTM tokens are also used to pay for network fees related to things like transactions or smart contract deployments.

The total supply of FTM is capped at 3.175 billion, with about 2.1 billion in circulation currently and the remainder reserved for staking rewards. Depending on governance decisions, if the rewards stay at the current levels it will take more than 2 years to distribute all the rewards and reach full circulation of total supply. To make trading easier, the token has been distributed over different token standards including the FTM native mainnet token, ERC-20, and BEP-2.

Originally published at https://academy.aaxspace.com on August 10, 2021.