Author: Daniel Li, CoinVoice

In the current cryptocurrency market, the veteran altcoin FTM has once again attracted investors' attention. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that in March alone, FTM's price surged by 150%. Even more surprising is that despite the recent market downturn when Bitcoin and Ethereum experienced a pullback due to Japan's interest rate hike, FTM continued to rise against the trend by 30%. This remarkable performance has not only greatly encouraged investors but also deepened the market's attention to FTM's potential.

There are several reasons why FTM has been able to rise again. Firstly, the strong publicity by Andre Cronje (AC), a director of the Fantom Foundation, has injected new vitality and confidence into Fantom, rekindling people's confidence in the prospects of the veteran project Fantom. Secondly, the market has positive expectations for the upcoming Fantom Sonic. AC stated that Sonic will surpass "parallel EVM" and trigger a revolutionary change, further enhancing investors' confidence in FTM. This wave of FTM's upward trend may just be the beginning.

Resurgence of the Veteran Public Chain Fantom

Fantom was initially founded by computer scientist Ahn Byung in January 2018 and later taken over by smart contract Ethereum developer Michael Kong. The project was originally intended to overcome the limitations faced by the previous generation of blockchains and achieve a balance between scalability, security, and decentralization.

In September 2018, Andre Cronje joined Fantom as a DeFi architect and later became a director of the Fantom Foundation. As a leading figure in the previous DeFi boom, AC created star projects such as Yearn Finance, Phantom, and made significant contributions to many important projects such as Keep3r Network, Multichain, Chainlist, Solidly, and Bribe crv Finance.

AC's involvement made a significant contribution to Fantom's technical breakthroughs, particularly in driving Fantom's multi-chain work. Fantom adopts the advanced aBFT (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism Lachesis, which is based on an improved version of the DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), allowing different blockchains to exist asynchronously without slowing down the main network. Additionally, Lachesis enables transactions to be completed almost instantly and can resist malicious behavior from up to one-third of network participants. This mechanism makes Fantom faster, cheaper, and more secure than previous technologies, solving the long-standing trilemma of blockchain at Layer 1.

In 2019, Fantom launched the first-generation Opera mainnet compatible with EVM, providing full smart contract support through Solidity and EVM, allowing any Ethereum-based DApp to seamlessly migrate to Fantom. With a modular architecture, Fantom can also provide fully customized blockchains for digital assets with different functionalities tailored for specific use cases. Therefore, during the initial launch period of Fantom Opera, Fantom attracted widespread attention in the market and was even widely regarded as an "Ethereum killer."

In March 2022, there were rumors that Andre Cronje and another collaborator, Anton Nell, would leave the DeFi industry and temporarily suspend about 25 applications and services, including Fantom. Although the Fantom Foundation later issued a statement that Andre Cronje did not completely leave the DeFi industry but transitioned to providing technical support behind the scenes, this event had a huge impact on the FTM token. Coupled with the entire crypto industry entering a bear market, the FTM token price plummeted from a peak of $3.0 to $0.19 and lingered below $0.6 for two years. It wasn't until the beginning of this year that Andre Cronje's frequent announcements about the progress of the Fantom ecosystem reignited investors' enthusiasm.

Since the beginning of the year, FTM has surged by nearly 200%. Part of this growth comes from Andre Cronje's active promotion, even using memes to promote Fantom, stating that Fantom Sonic will bring better efficiency than the parallel EVM path. Despite some skepticism about new public chains, Fantom has attracted great attention in a short period of time. Meanwhile, after two years of silence, Fantom has also made significant breakthroughs in the technical field. The Fantom Foundation announced the upcoming launch of the latest technological upgrade, Fantom Sonic, which AC has high hopes for, stating that it is expected to surpass the existing "parallel EVM" and trigger a revolutionary change.

What Is Fantom Sonic?

Fantom Sonic is the latest technological upgrade of the Fantom network, aimed at enhancing the network's scale and efficiency. As early as October 2023, the Fantom Foundation announced the launch of the Fantom Sonic plan, which has attracted widespread attention as an important milestone long-awaited by the Fantom community and the DeFi ecosystem.

Fantom Sonic introduces a series of innovative technologies and optimization solutions to further strengthen the performance and functionality of the Fantom network.

1. Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM): Fantom Sonic introduces a new virtual machine, FVM. Compared to the previous EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), FVM provides a more efficient smart contract execution environment, greatly accelerating the deployment and execution speed of contracts. This improvement enables developers to build and deploy smart contracts more efficiently, while users can conduct transactions more quickly. Fantom Sonic elevates the development and execution efficiency of smart contracts to a new level.

2. Carmen Database: Fantom Sonic enhances the network's data storage capacity by introducing a new data storage solution called Carmen. Through Carmen, Fantom Sonic successfully reduces storage requirements by 90%, reducing the data recorded by validator nodes from over 2,000 GB to 300 GB and the data recorded by archive nodes from over 11 TB to below 1 TB. This technological innovation enables the Fantom network to efficiently handle larger-scale data and provides developers and users with more efficient data management capabilities.

3. Lachesis Consensus Mechanism: Fantom Sonic adopts the Lachesis consensus algorithm as the foundation of its consensus mechanism. Lachesis is a leaderless asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) consensus mechanism, which has been further optimized in the Sonic upgrade. By reducing information redundancy and improving decision-making efficiency, Fantom Sonic accelerates the transaction confirmation process, increases the network's throughput and performance. This optimization enables the Fantom network to process more transactions while ensuring security and achieving lower transaction latency.

4. High Throughput and Low Latency: The theoretical transaction throughput limit of Fantom Sonic is over 2,000 transactions per second, with an average finalization time of just one second. This allows the Fantom network to process more transactions and achieve rapid transaction confirmation, providing users with a smoother and more efficient trading experience. High throughput and low latency are important breakthroughs for Fantom Sonic in terms of performance, offering users better transaction efficiency and experience.

5. Smooth Upgrades: As the next-generation iterative version of the Fantom network, Fantom Sonic is fully compatible with existing smart contracts, services, and tools on Fantom Opera. This means that existing applications and contracts can continue to run on the Fantom network without the need for major modifications. This feature of smooth upgrades helps reduce the risk during the upgrade process, providing better compatibility and stability for developers and users. The smooth upgrade mechanism of Fantom Sonic also provides better assurance and support for the sustainable development of the ecosystem.

Fantom Sonic: A New Chapter for Fantom

The release of Sonic marks the beginning of a new chapter for Fantom. After the upgrade, Fantom not only possesses features such as non-forking upgrades, true parallel transactions, top-notch TPS, and finality, but also has the ability to reduce local smart contract wallet and data storage demands by 90%, making it an advanced platform that sets it apart from other layer1 chains.

Today, the fate of Fantom is no longer just about survival, but about how it can capture market share from other Layer 1 protocols and translate it into the price trend of the FTM token. Although Fantom's market value is currently only $30 billion, with the development of Fantom Sonic, the future value of Fantom is undoubtedly more promising.

Fantom's DeFi ecosystem occupies a dominant position, and Sonic is helping it reach new heights.

In this bull market, the meme coin ecosystem has become a battleground for public chains. Prior to the bull market, Solana relied on the popularity of Bonk to maintain the confidence of the Solana ecosystem and SOL holders, leading to a true recovery for Solana. Therefore, some members of the Fantom community also hope that Fantom can leverage the meme coin craze to achieve an ecosystem outbreak. The Fantom Foundation even specifically reposted an introduction to $sGOAT, a meme coin. As a result, $sGOAT has become the meme coin with the most holders on Fantom (over 1,000 holders) within just one day of its launch.

However, driving the development of the meme ecosystem may not necessarily be suitable for the current Fantom ecosystem. The outbreak of meme coins often represents the result of ecosystem prosperity. Although the Fantom ecosystem has already surpassed 250 projects, its ecosystem is not active. According to tokenterminal data, Fantom has an average of about 50,000 daily active users in the past month. Overall, the ecosystem's activity still lags behind other public chains such as Ethereum and Solana. Therefore, it is not realistic for Fantom to rely on memes to drive user growth at the moment. Fantom needs to find a development approach that suits its own needs.

In the "Fantom Q1 2024 Overview," in addition to detailing Fantom's performance advantages, a comparison with the competitor Solana is made. Solana prioritizes network speed and low transaction costs, which has led to its security being heavily questioned. Since 2021, Solana has experienced multiple instances of downtime due to serious errors. In contrast, Fantom has only experienced one network downtime and was corrected within seven hours without causing any financial losses.

Currently, among the 254 ecosystem projects listed by Fantom, there are 118 DeFi projects, accounting for nearly half of the total. Therefore, prioritizing the development of the DeFi ecosystem is more important for Fantom than driving the development of the meme ecosystem. On March 28, Fantom announced the progress of a new round of financing for Sonic, with the first angel investor being the founder of FraxFinance. Collaboration with Frax may provide a new path for the revival of DeFi on Fantom.

The Fantom Foundation also has high hopes for Sonic's development in the DeFi field. According to "The Block," Michael Kong, the CEO of the Fantom Foundation, stated that Sonic will launch a series of plans in the future, including supporting liquidity staking tokens, establishing new staking mechanisms, and more decentralized and secure cross-chain solutions, allowing users to bridge funds from Ethereum to enhance DeFi activities on Fantom.

Kong stated: "Sonic will be used to create a new first-class shared sequencer for L1 and L2 chains, capable of processing over 180 million transactions per day with true sub-second confirmation times, and relaunching Fantom based on a brand new community-centric foundation."

Fantom Sonic Ecosystem Project Overview

The success of a public chain depends not only on its strong technical advantages but also on the development of ecosystem projects. In order to attract more high-quality projects to join the Fantom ecosystem, the Fantom Foundation established an incubator called Sonic Labs in December last year. This incubator is personally supported by the official team and has invested significant resources and technology to support developers in building new projects.

The recently announced winners of the Sonic Labs Entrepreneur Accelerator Program demonstrate the attractiveness and vitality of the Fantom ecosystem. These projects cover innovations in multiple areas, including perpetual DEX (decentralized exchange), social protocols, P2P lending platforms, green tech startups, and RPG blockchain games. The addition of these projects will further enrich the Fantom ecosystem, providing users with more application scenarios and services, and opening up more choices and opportunities.

Perpetual DEX Project Lynx

Lynx is an advanced decentralized perpetual exchange that allows any protocol, DAO, or blockchain to easily list tokens as collateral assets. On the Lynx platform, users can invest using various tokens without selling their assets, thereby investing in other assets.

Lynx has multiple advantages: users can use any listed collateral token for perpetual contract trading without worrying about the impact of price fluctuations on the health of their positions; trading does not require payment of gas fees or holding the native token of the chain, ensuring zero gas cost transactions. In addition, Lynx's cross-chain system allows users to interact with perpetual exchanges on any source chain on the Lynx platform and settle on the Lynx engine chain. In the future, Lynx will integrate with the latest Fantom Sonic mainnet, providing it with faster block rates, low gas prices, and all the infrastructure needed for perpetual trading applications.

Social Protocol Thunder Dome

Thunder Dome is a full-stack social finance (Fi) service built on the Fantom blockchain, designed to provide users with a way to interact with the community through tickets. These tickets are tradable social tokens that allow users to interact and engage in communities centered around individuals, groups, or themes. The emergence of Thunder Dome marks the evolution of social finance from individual-centered social finance to a broader expansion that includes groups and themes.

In Thunder Dome, users can purchase tickets to participate in different types of communities and build connections within them. Additionally, users can generate income through Thunder Dome. Holders of individual tickets can receive 5% of the trading amount in profit, while holders of group and theme tickets share 5% of the trading volume profit in proportion to their holdings. Currently, Thunder Dome has successfully operated on the Fantom Sonic testnet and is planned to launch on the mainnet simultaneously with the Sonic mainnet.

P2P Lending Platform Debita

Debita is a P2P oracle-less lending protocol on Fantom, designed to provide decentralized lending solutions. As part of the Fantom ecosystem, Debita offers lending functionality for users and developers, driving the development and growth of the ecosystem.
Debita platform offers a range of unique and attractive features, such as fair interest rates and tokenizing loan positions. Additionally, Debita built on the Fantom blockchain ensures the security and transparency of transactions while eliminating the risk of liquidation due to collateral depreciation. Furthermore, Debita welcomes a wide range of borrowers and lenders, simplifying the process of finding suitable financing options and providing customized solutions to meet the unique needs of each user, offering flexibility and adaptability.

Green Tech Startup KiriCoin

KiriCoin is a green tech startup focused on tracking and rewarding individual sustainable behaviors to address climate change. Although the introduction to KiriCoin is relatively scarce, its recognition as a winner of Sonic Labs indicates that the project is well-regarded. By combining Fantom's advanced technology with KiriCoin's sustainable development philosophy, we can anticipate that this project will play an important role in promoting the construction of a more environmentally friendly and sustainable world in the future.

RPG Blockchain Game Froqorion

Froqorion: An Innovative RPG Blockchain Game in the Fantom Ecosystem

Froqorion, an incubation project under the Fantom Foundation's Sonic Labs, is an innovative game in the Fantom ecosystem. The game is set in an ancient frog civilization called Froqorion, where players take on the role of heroes in this civilization. The game adopts a team-based RPG gameplay, where the player's goal is to collect the powers of the four elements (earth, wind, fire, water) and assemble a team to complete various tasks and adventures through cooperation.

As part of the Fantom ecosystem, Froqorion also provides some functionalities and mechanisms related to the Fantom blockchain, such as token incentives. Overall, Froqorion is an innovative RPG blockchain game project based on the Fantom blockchain, bringing new application scenarios and gameplay to the Fantom ecosystem. It combines the background of the frog civilization with team-based RPG elements, providing players with a fun and unique gaming experience.

Summary

After the upgrade of Kanban, the market's attention has shifted to solving blockchain scalability through layer 2, and the emergence of Sonic has provided a new perspective. As the most scalable and secure blockchain technology in Fantom to date, Sonic achieves a true transaction processing speed of 2,000 TPS, achieving sub-second performance. This performance metric has surpassed most Layer 2-based solutions, indicating that Layer 1 public chains can also improve scalability through their own technological innovations, without necessarily relying on Layer 2.

In this bull market, Fantom may not be the most prominent project, but it is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated. With the return of AC, the upgrade of Sonic, and the revival of the DeFi ecosystem, Fantom may have the opportunity to rise again in this bull market.

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