What is Fantom (FTM)

Fantom is a scalable next-generation blockchain platform popular among Decentralised Finance (DeFi) customers, business applications, and EVM developers. Fantom's mainnet, Fantom Opera, is open-source and permissionless and employs an asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT) consensus method dubbed Lachesis. With Lachesis, the network's nodes attain consensus independently without needing to exchange finished blocks. For users, transactions are verified and concluded often within a few seconds.

A Brief History of Fantom

South Korean computer scientist Dr Ahn Byung Ik founded Fantom in 2018. Fantom Foundation raised US$40 million on 22 June 2018.

Fantom has incorporated Lachesis as a consensus layer that may extend to new layers inside the system. The Fantom ecosystem may ultimately consist of numerous blockchain layers with Lachesis at the core. The first extra layer inside Fantom was Opera, an EVM-compatible smart contract platform released in December 2019. Opera is a proof of stake (PoS) layer whose validator set employs Lachesis to verify transactions and create new blocks. It offers over 80+ decentralised finance (DeFi) apps, like SushiSwap and Curve.

In May 2019, Fantom announced it would be collaborating with the Binance Chain to promote interoperability via a multi-asset and cross-chain ecosystem. This multi-asset plan would add numerous new token standards to Fantom, including Fantom versions of Ethereum's ERC20 and Binance Chain's BEP-2. These specifications establish the foundation for implementing popular Ethereum apps on Opera in early 2021.

The Fantom Foundation has moved its emphasis towards DeFi use cases with the support of Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje, who works as a technical adviser to Fantom. Andre has advised and helped promote Fantom's multichain activities, notably the creation of Fantom's bridge to Ethereum. After assisting the Fantom DeFi ecosystem, Andre recently announced that he would be taking a step back and no longer contribute to the Crypto/DeFi space for the time being.

In late January 2022, Fantom became the world’s third-largest blockchain system after Bitcoin and Ethereum, with an ecosystem now over $12 billion.

How Fantom Works

Fantom is a fast, scalable, and secure platform for digital assets. It is based on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that offer developers DeFi services using its proprietary consensus mechanism. Fantom, along with its in-house coin FTM, promises to alleviate issues connected with smart-contract platforms, notably transaction speed, which creators claim is lower than 2 seconds.

According to Fantom, the Lachesis mechanism offers substantially larger capacity and 2-second transaction finalisation and security enhancements over existing proof of stake (PoS) algorithm-based platforms. Lachesis is a consensus layer of the blockchain technology stack that can insert into any distributed ledger. Lachesis powers Fantom's Opera mainnet deployment, which runs on the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) and is Ethereum-compatible.

Each Fantom DApp has its own blockchain. They all share the Lachesis consensus and can communicate, but they are otherwise autonomous and have diverse governance norms. As a result, Fantom is comparable to Polkadot, Cosmos, and other multichain networks. Fantom claims to handle an endless number of such DApp blockchains without sacrificing speed or efficiency.

What is Fantom Used for?

One unique characteristic about Fantom is that its smart contracts create more secure, dependable, and sophisticated DApps and financial solutions. Payments, digital identification, and medical records are primary use cases. Lachesis is the proof of stake (PoS) consensus technique used by Fantom for these purposes.

Fantom provides users Leaderless On-chain governance through a proof of stake mechanism, the so-called 'Lachesis Consensus'. As an aBFT mechanism, Lachesis helps Fantom's validator nodes solve the preceding blockchain's dilemma in terms of time efficiency and transaction volume. Fantom's smart contract was designed in Solidity, the Ethereum-based coding language, and its function is compatible with both Fantom and Ethereum in a cross-chain way.

For this, developers may connect their smart contracts into Ethereum and enjoy Fantom's rapid speed to the best degree possible. Fantom helps users establish private or public ledgers by utilising EVM and Cosmos SDK.