Fantom

Fantom is a smart contracts platform designed for high-performance decentralized applications. Fantom utilizes leaderless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus: the integrity of blockchain is secured by staking Fantom (FTM) tokens by network participants.

Fantom released its testnet in late 2018 while mainnet operations started in December, 2019. Fantom’s Proof-of-Stake is ‘truly’ peer-to-peer one: there are no masternodes in Fantom. Thus, Fantom merges the benefits of highly decentralized and secure blockchain systems.

Fantom is focused on powerful scaling mechanisms and emphasizes unparalleled modularity of its structure. Thus, it is suitable for both retail and B2B use-cases. Its modular design empowers Fantom’s clients with a rich toolkit of customization options.

Fantom utilizes Lachesis, an Asynchronous Byzantine-Fault Tolerance consensus (aBFT). This system is asynchronous (participants can process commands in different times), fault-tolerant, high-performance (the block is finalized in 1-2 seconds). Each Lachesis node stores a local acyclic directed graph (DAG), that, in turns, stores blocks that contain transactions. Period of Lachesis lifespan is called epoch.

Lachesis powers Fantom’s mainnet environment Opera. It is fully compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) so that Ethereum-based dApps can be easily ported to Fantom. Moreover, it supports Solidity compiler: its developer experience is similar to that of Ethereum (ETH) and other EVM-compatible blockchains.

Fantom is both open-source and open- participation: everyone can experiment with building decentralized applications on Fantom and run Fantom nodes. Minimum stake of 3,175,000 FTM is required for running a node while the validation process can be joined with 1 FTM locked.

The list of basic DeFi-specific use-cases with Fantom include minting stablecoins (fUSD) with FTM. FTM tokens can be pledged as a collateral with a 500% collateralization ratio. fUSD is a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. Dollar.

Then there is a plethora of synthetic assets on Fantom. fETH and fBTC are the most popular ones. In total, 176 coins are available on Fantom as of late Q3, 2021. Fantom-based assets can be seamlessly exchanged between each other in a decentralized in-chain manner.

Finally, Fantom boasts fLEND, a native peer-to-peer lending/borrowing ecosystem. FTM and fUSD can be collateralized to obtain a loan. Also, fUSD users can borrow Fantom-based synthetics to trade or stake them.

Since January 2021, Fantom switched to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) as a governance model. As a result, Fantom is a first-ever Layer-1 blockchain that implements similar functionality.

40+ decentralized applications are live on Fantom right now. CREAM Finance, SuperFarm, Zapper, SushiSwap, AnySwap, REN Protocol are the most popular mainstream dApps that utilize Fantom’s smart contracts.

Besides providing an ordinary smart contract environment, Fantom also developed a user-friendly Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) interface.