What Is The Fantom Network | A DeFi Powerhouse Explained
What is Fantom?
Fantom is a high-performance, scalable, and secure smart-contract platform. It is designed to overcome the limitations of previous generation blockchain platforms. Fantom is permissionless, decentralized, and open-source. Fantom is no joke. At already about a $3/4 billion market cap, they have partnered with some of cryptos biggest giants. Chainlink, Band Protocol, The Graph, API3, Ren, Waves, Ethereum Classic and more. Within Fantom, is Lachesis (tough word until you say it a few times quickly…go!), its revolutionary a BFT consensus mechanism, allows Fantom to be much faster and cheaper than older technologies, yet extremely secure.
Why Fantom?
Current solutions make trade-offs between three components: scalability, security and decentralization. This is known as the blockchain trilemma. Bitcoin for example focuses on decentralization and security, which makes it less suited for any kind of transaction that requires speed and fast confirmation, like day-to-day payments, data transfer, asset trading or other transactions consumers and businesses rely on in everyday life.
Fantom tackles the problem at the core: its high-speed consensus mechanism, Lachesis, allows digital assets to operate at unprecedented speed and delivers dramatic improvements over the current systems. Unlike other solutions, Fantom does not sacrifice security and decentralization in favor of scalability.
What is FTM and What is it Used For?
FTM is the primary token on the Fantom network. FTM is used for securing the network through staking, for governance, for payments, and for fees. The FTM token on Fantom is used to secure the network via a Proof-of-Stake system and for payments through Fantom’s high throughput, fast finality, and low fee network. A money transfer costs about $0.0000001 and takes about 1 second to transfer. Go ask your bank to match that hahaha. The FTM Token is also for on-chain governance which is super important in a fully permissionless and decentralized ecosystem. Lastly, FTM is used for network fees for transactions and fees to deploy smart contracts. Similar to how ETH is used on the ERC-20 network.
How Does Fantom Work?
Fantom is Modular
Lachesis represents one layer, the consensus, of the blockchain technology stack and can be plugged into any distributed ledger. Lachesis powers Fantom’s Opera mainnet deployment, that uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and it’s compatible with Ethereum. The modularity makes Fantom exceptionally flexible. Developers can port their existing Ethereum-based dApps on Fantom Opera mainnet in a matter of minutes, substantially upgrading the performance and lowering the costs.
Fantom is Scalable
Each network built on Fantom is independent from one another. Their performance and stability are unaffected by traffic or congestion. The first generation of blockchain platforms (Ethereum and alike) opened the doors to smart contracts, conditional logic instructions that allow the execution of applications on the blockchain.
However, with more complex dApps and/or with the increase of the users, the whole network slows down. This happens because all the dApps use the same infrastructure. It’s similar to executing multiple applications on a computer: at some point the computer will choke and start to respond very slowly or even hang altogether. Fantom solved the scalability issue by giving each application its own blockchain, similarly, to running each application on different computers that are part of the same network.
Each blockchain is independent from one another, and can have custom tokens, tokenomics, and governance rules. However, being all plugged into Lachesis, Fantom’s uber-fast aBFT consensus, all the blockchains can interact with each other and benefit from the speed and security of the underlying technology. Each network is completely customizable according to the specific usage.
If we think of Ethereum as a decentralized computer, Fantom is a network made of a potentially infinite number of decentralized computers. They all share the same logic, but they are completely independent from one another. Yet, they can easily communicate with one another.
In other words, Fantom is a network of networks.
Fantom is secure and environmentally friendly
Fantom is secured by Proof-of-Stake. Unlike Proof-of-Work, used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, Proof-of-Stake prevents centralization and saves electricity. Lachesis can provide institutional-grade security to distributed networks. Fantom offers absolute finality, which means that transactions can never be reverted like in networks with probabilistic finality. The consensus mechanism can also scale to hundreds of nodes, increasing decentralization and therefore security. Lastly, Lachesis is leaderless. By removing leaders, security doesn’t rely on a small set of actors.
Get Connected to Fantom
Create a Fantom Wallet by visiting their website. Stuck on Metamask? No problem. Link your Metamask to the Fantom Network via the instructions here on their website.
Where is Fantom going?
Fantom is based on Lachesis, an innovative aBFT consensus. On top of that, they are creating a blockchain ecosystem along the whole blockchain technology stack. They are building the infrastructure for a more connected and efficient future where people will be able to take advantage of the technological breakthroughs to improve the quality of their lives. Fantom is on a mission to change how we make payments and creating a fully digital economy including digital identities and medical records. Fantom is creating a global scale internet of digital assets.
Fantom Network is growing fast, and for good reason. Don’t ignore Fantom as before you know if, they’ll crack a billion-dollar market cap and be known by the whole crypto world.
That’s all for now. Till the next Medium, you’re on your own. Laterrrrrrrrrr.
