Sonic (S)

• From CMC (9-3-2020):

"FANTOM is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based Smart Contract platform that aims to solve the scalability issues of distributed ledger technologies. The platform aims to differentiate itself with its “Lachesis Protocol” , which will be integrated with Fantom OPERA Chain. The goal is to support the development of dApps that to enjoy instant transactions and near zero transaction costs for all users."

Sonic

Type	Smart Contract Platform
Consensus mechanism	DAG
Total supply	CMC: 1,987,133,655 FTM Messari: 3,175,000,000.00 FTM
Website	https://fantom.foundation/

Basics

• Based in: South Korea
• Founded in: 2018

• Released the Fantom testnet in 12-2018. Had its mainnet launch (27-12-2019). Two quarters later then had been anticipated.

History

• Founded by South Korean computer scientist Dr. Ahn Byung lk (2018).
• From this blog (8-3-2022):

"On January 6, 2022, Andre Cronje, the (now ex) lead technical advisor of the Fantom Foundation & architect of Yearn Finance, revealed his new ve(3,3) Automated Market Maker (AMM) incentive model, a synthesis of Curve Finance’s vested escrow model & OlympusDAO’s concept of (3,3) game theory. In a joint partnership with Danielle Sestagalli, founder of Wonderland Money, Andre Cronje decided to conduct an ecosystem-wide distribution for their new project utilizing the new ve(3,3) model, where locked veNFTs will be given to the top 20 protocols by TVL, with its snapshot ending on Jan. 25, 2022. Leading up to the snapshot, the Fantom ecosystem experienced a massive influx of capital as protocols started to offer attractive yield farming rewards to attract TVL. The ecosystem’s native token, FTM, hit an all-time high of $3.49 while its TVL peaked at a high of $12.8 billion, briefly surpassing the (then) Binance Smart Chain (BSC) ecosystem to become the third largest Layer 1 blockchain by TVL, just behind Ethereum and Terra respectively. In order to attract more TVL, new protocols such as 0xDAO, veDAO and Radial offered their own protocol’s token emissions at highly lucrative yields through their liquidity mining programs, enabling liquidity providers to earn as much as ~3000% APR on their crypto assets. 0xDAO alone managed to amass a whopping $4.33 billion TVL in the first four days of its inception.

However, and just as the Solid Wars were getting started, rumors were flying around that Andre Cronje had left the Fantom Foundation. Along with the fact that his Twitter account was deleted or deactivated, Cronje’s updating of his LinkedIn page further reinforced these rumors. Finally, @AntonNellCrypto formally confirmed said rumors to be true by dropping a bombshell via Twitter on Sunday evening (Asian trading hours), announcing that he and Cronje will be leaving the crypto and DeFi space, and will no longer be contributing to it. The Fantom Foundation has since come out to thank Andre Cronje for his contributions to the space and emphasized the fact that the foundation is not a one-man team. The team also stated that the development of Fantom won’t be impacted by Cronje’s decision to leave the space. Despite that, Fantom’s TVL has, since the announcement, fallen from a local high of $12.09 billion to a low of $7.14 billion, constituting a significant 40.94% decrease from one week ago. "

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].
• Had audits on its token sale smart contracts.

Bugs/Exploits

• Fantom's two largest validators, which held more that one-third of the network's stake combined slowed their block emission rate (25-2-2021). This caused an offline time of seven hours according to Messari (31-3-2021).

Governance

• From Messari (9-3-2020):

Delegated On-Chain Vote

• From Messari (9-3-2020):

"The Fantom Foundation has released a proposal for governance on the Fantom ($FTM) mainnet with four key areas of focus. According to the team those four areas are:

1. Decentralisation: The platform should ultimately be run by the public: community, developers, token holders, and anyone who is a stakeholder.
2. Security: Checks-and-balances should be in place to ensure that changes to governance and the underlying platform are robust, secure, and with the consent of stakeholders.
3. Participation: Stakeholders can participate by being a tokenholder, running a validator node, or being a member of the moderating or technical committees.
4. Efficiency: Changes that are consented to should be implemented efficiently. Rejected proposals should come at a cost, to ensure that only proposals which are likely to be implemented are considered. Hence, each proposal to change the network will require an FTM deposit.

The full proposal is available here."

In the proposal it states:

"The Fantom Foundation will initially have a key role to play, as it will nominate the first Technical Committee, the first team of Moderators and the first Review Board.

As specified in Article 5 Section 2 of the Fantom Constitution, the Fantom Foundation will also have the right to make changes to Fantom Network Rules, which include governance rules, for 6 months after mainnet launch.

The Fantom Foundation will also, for some time, have a significant influence on votes, as it will be holding a large block of FTM tokens. The Foundation will particularly use this voting power during the first year after mainnet launch to effect changes in voting parameters so that they correspond better to the actual voting and participation patterns of the Fantom network. The Foundation will then gradually refrain from exerting influence."

No clear timeline has been given for this refraining.

"The Fantom Constitution itself can only be changed by a majority vote of the Assembly, with at least 65% voting power in favour and a quorum of 50% voting power.

Proposals for emergency changes can be decided upon by the Technical Committee with a simple majority, subject to a quorum of 50%.

The Assembly will be able to veto any emergency decision via a majority vote organised by the Moderators immediately after a positive emergency vote by the Technical Committee. A veto can be obtained with a simple majority of voting power, subject to a quorum of 10% of voting power.

The voting power of an account will depend both on tokens held and on that user’s activity, with voting itself constituting one type of activity. Therefore, actively participating in the voting process will increase a user’s share of block rewards for delegated tokens. The exact parameters of how voting power is computed will be determined later.

In the future, the Fantom Network is expected to integrate with one or more SSI (Self-Sovereign Identity) platforms. Accounts that become linked to a real person via SSI will then be given a higher weight than unidentified accounts."

Token

Launch

• Has BEP2, ERC-20 and a Native one. There is a Fantom-bridge (8-1-2020) to swap the tokens for the mainnet coin.
• Had a crowdsale and private sale.

Token allocation

• From Messari (9-3-2020):

"A total of 3.175 billion FTM was initially issued. The entirety of the supply, including staking rewards, was issued at launch.

40% was allocated to Public and Private Sale investors, including private sale bonuses. Those FTM have no vesting schedule.

15% was allocated to advisors, with a 3-months lockup

10% was allocated to the founding team. This allocation features a 24-months vesting period with monthly-cliffs

3.6% was allocated to a strategic reserve. Those FTM have no vesting schedule.

31.4% was reserved for staking rewards, to be distributed daily until 2024

Fantom's outstanding supply is fixed. The liquid supply increase displayed on the curve is the consequence of the vesting schedules detailed in the Launch section as well as the distribution of premined staking rewards. Those rewards are set to be distributed daily to validators and delegators. The daily expected distribution is set at 682,425.46 FTM, until 2024."

Binance Research has conflicting information:

• "Seed Sale tokens make up 3.15% of total token supply.
• Private Token Sale tokens make up 37.04% of total token supply.
• Public Sale tokens make up 1.57% of total token supply.
• Team is allocated 7.49% of total token supply.
• Advisors received 12% of total token supply.
• Token Reserve constitutes 6% of total token supply.
• Block Rewards is allocated 32.75% of total token supply."

Utility

• From Messari (9-3-2020): FTM tokens are intended to be used as payment for transaction fees, to stake on the network for security purposes, and to participate in on-chain governance.

Token Details

FTM and FTG

• FTG is not talked about anymore but the last post (2019) asking about it concludes in that it is now phased away into the back.
• From this deep dive (6-2019):

"There will be two types of tokens on the mainnet: FTM and FTG.

FTM will be listed on exchanges and its value proposition is based upon the growth of the Fantom network by transaction volume.

FTG is the internal gas token, which pays for all transactions on the network and will be fixed against fiat at a rate that proves profitable for validators.

It is expected that FTG will track cloud computing and storage costs, thus its price is expected to decline over time, though this will be decided by on-chain voting.

FTG can only be bought with FTM."

Technology

• Whitepaper can be found here (28-8-2018).
• Code can be viewed here.
• Developing in Rust, Golang and Java (12-5-2019).
• Once claimed 300,000 TPS (2020) but adjusted it to 4500 TPS (2021).

How it works

• From the GoFantom website (10-3-2020): aBFT consensus, 2 sec time to finality, DAG with turing complete VM.
• Lachesis asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance ('aBFT') DAG-based consensus protocol and TxFlow consensus mechanisms. Leaderless Proof of Stake (not Delegated Proof of Stake). From their own website (10-3-2020):

"'aBFT' means that transactions are confirmed as fast as possible as they enter the network, instead of waiting for previous transactions to be confirmed. Instead of centralizing all computing power and all usage on a single decentralized ledger, users of the Fantom ecosystem deploy their own independent distributed ledgers with the consensus at its core, while being able to communicate with one another.

A distributed ledger is considered to be a platform, and the consensus is considered to be a module. Users will be able to deploy their own distributed ledgers which will be powered by Lachesis aBFT and/or TxFlow, in combination with different types of middleware ranging from the Fantom SDK to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Lachesis aBFT is a Fantom’s core asynchronous and leaderless byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocol. It is based on principles about gossip protocols where small bits of information are propagated throughout the network rapidly. In order to make it as easy as possible to build distributed ledgers tailored to the needs of the user, we designed Lachesis aBFT to be highly adaptable and compatible with existing codebases such as Cosmos SDK and Go-Ethereum.

TxFlow is a protocol for transaction responsiveness. It is not a new consensus mechanism, but a protocol to run concurrently to consensus wherein users submit transactions and receive confirmations in real time. Regular consensus systems, such as BFT creating blocks and voting on them, are still required as a secondary—or perhaps rather primary—security mechanism. So if the transaction did not receive enough votes before the block proposal that would have included it, it will still be added."

• From Messari (9-3-2020):

"The Fantom OPERA Chain has three layers the Core Layer which processes transactions at scale, the OPERA Ware layer which supports Smart Contract functionality and the OPERA application layer to provide support for third party applications The OPERA Chain utilizes the Lachesis protocol which looks to create potentially infinite scalability with hundreds of thousands of transactions per second by adopting a method where a single event block verifies the previous transaction, and transactions are verified and processed asynchronously without needing approval from miners. Event blocks store information that include multiple data packages which contain transactions, Smart Contracts, historical information, reputation management and rewards.

The event block that can connect a supra-majority (greater than two thirds) among event blocks will be appointed as the Clotho and utilized for the appointment of Atropos and for the consensus of other event blocks. The Atropos constitutes the main chain and is utilized in the consensus of other event blocks.

Fantom OPERA Chain intends to use a high-level Scala-based functional programming language that compiles to smart contract bytecode on the Fantom Network. Scala has a large community of users and is known to be comparatively easy to learn. It was developed to remove the inconvenience of Java and allows developers to write organized and clean code. Scala provides both object-oriented and functional coding paradigms."

• From Binance (10-3-2020):

"The following are some steps for a transaction to reach finality in the Fantom network:

1. When a user submits a transaction into a node, a successful submission receipt will be issued to the client as a confirmation of the submitted transaction.
2. The node will batch the user submitted transactions into a new event block amended into a DAG structure of event blocks and then will broadcast the event block to all other nodes of the system. The node will send a receipt confirming that the containing event block identifier is being processed.
3. When the event block is known by majority of the nodes (e.g. it becomes a Root event block), or being known by such a Root block, the node will send a confirmation that the event block is acknowledged by a majority of the nodes.
4. The system will determine the condition at which a Root event block becomes a Clotho for being further acknowledged by a majority of the nodes. A confirmation is then sent to the client to indicate that the event block has come to the semi-final stage as a Clotho or being confirmed by a Clotho.
5. After the Clotho stage, the network will determine the consensus timestamp for the Clotho and its dependent event blocks. Once an event block gets the final consensus timestamp, it is finalized and a final confirmation will be issued to the client that the transaction has been successfully finalized."

Staking

• For all the basic information on staking on Fantom, check this blog (22-2-2019) of them.
• From this deep dive (6-2019):

"Validator nodes require 3.175m FTM to operate and receive staking rewards and partial transaction fee. Delegators support validator nodes and receive a portions of their rewards but pay a 15% fee to the validator."

• From their blog (27-12-2019):

"Stakers that misbehave, for example, by double-signing blocks, are labelled by the network as cheaters, and their tokens are slashed.

Nodes that are high-performing with consistent uptime earn more rewards with a higher Proof of Importance score, which measures node performance.

Validators and Delegators earn rewards after each epoch (1000 event blocks generated by the network since the previous epoch, or after 4 hours have elapsed since the previous epoch, which ever occurs first).

Rewards (consisting of both network rewards and fees) are distributed across validators and delegators, according to their Proof of Importance score, their origination score (how many transactions they originate) and, most importantly, the amount of FTM staked.

To encourage users to stake FTM, and thereby increase the security of the network, rewards are locked until the minimum staking amount of the network (starting at 80%) is reached. This minimum staking amount decreases every second, on average, 1% a week).

Rewards are locked for a 6 month period from the launch of the mainnet."

• From a Reddit thread (22-1-2020):

"Once you start staking, your coins aren't exactly locked, but there are some conditions.

1. If you want to unstake your coins you have to wait 7 days to access them.
2. Staking rewards unlock on 6/23/2020. If you unstake before this date you will lose all the staking rewards you earned.

Any rewards you earned will be burned if you unstake before rewards are unlocked."

• For more information on the staking/delegating and transaction rewards, check this blog (6-4-2019).

Validator Stats

• As of 10-3-2020, 10.87% of FTM are staked on it's network. And 33.66% are delegated.
• Fantom's two largest validators, which held more that one-third of the network's stake combined slowed their block emission rate (25-2-2021). This caused an offline time of seven hours according to Messari (31-3-2021). This shows clear staking concentrations.
• 62% staked (21-6-2021).

Interoperability

• From this AMA (12-5-2019):

"Integrated with the EVM and LLVM so people can write and deploy turing-complete smart contracts across several languages."

Oracle Method

• Integrates (31-3-2020) Chainlink as its oracle solution and price feed mechanism. Went live (18-8-2021).
• Band Protocol and Fantom collaborate (19-3-2020) on bringing oracles to Opera Mainnet. Update: has now been integrated (18-9-2020).
• Announced their integration with DIA (16-12-2021).

Their Other Projects

Xar Network

• The Xar Network is a DeFi-oriented public blockchain built using Fantom’s Lachesis and TxFlow consensus.
• From their website (10-3-2020):

"The framework for Cosmos and Fantom-based decentralized finance. Xar Network was created from a need of corporate and central banks to use blockchain technology in a private, permissioned space. As our feature set grew we noticed consistent cross-over with the decentralized finance ecosystem, so eventually the Xar toolkit grew to a full-fledged decentralized finance toolbox.

XAR Network's public chain allows you to deposit any supported digital asset, collateralize it, mint Collateralized Stable Currency Tokens (CSCTs) based on this collateral, and then use these CSCTs to stake and earn rewards. All the while maintaining ownership of your underlying collateralized asset. Staking CSDT allows you to receive rewards from the fees pool, proportional to your share of the total CSDT stakes in the network. Your rewards are paid in a stable currency token, such as CSDT (collateralized stable dollar token), not in an inflationary token as in some other networks."

• From this announcement (10-2-2020):

“We’re collaborating with the ETClabs to bring DeFi, including all aspects of our tech stack (e.g., stablecoins, lending, staking, asset issuance, collateralization, etc.) to the Xar ecosystem,” detailed Michael Chen, CMO of The Fantom Foundation.

As part of the collaboration, users can leverage the Ethereum Classic token (ETC) as collateral to mint a stablecoin on the Fantom platform akin to MakerDAO’s Dai on Ethereum. However, Xar Network’s specific design enables agnostic issuance of collateralized stablecoins outside of ETC, including any supported Collateralized Stable Currency Tokens (CSCTs) on the network.

Some of its open-source modules include collateralized loans, collateralized index tokens, liquidity pools, synthetic swaps, and protocol-level atomic swaps. Xar is compatible with Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard and Binance Chain’s rising BEP-2 model."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

• From this deep dive (6-2019):

"It is expected that FTG will track cloud computing and storage costs, thus its price is expected to decline over time, though this will be decided by on-chain voting."

• When they had their mainnet launch (27-12-2019) these were the items that were their plans for the future:

1. "Remove the use of txPool for submitting transactions to the network
2. Pack more transactions into event blocks
3. Add moderators, who will help in the governance of the network
4. Implement governance functionality to control parameters of the network
5. Fix the number of parents per event block
6. Research and develop new Virtual Machine, and database with our partners: the University of Sydney and Yonsei University
7. Integrate Lachesis with the new Fantom Virtual Machine"

• Latest roadmap post can be fully read here (27-2-2020). Some points:

1. "FTM (both unlocked and locked) as a collateral to generate stablecoins (such as fUSD, and fEUR, to begin with) and different Synthetics (Q1 and 2)
2. Allow users to access these assets across a variety of different applications (ranging from finance and payment services) while utilising fast confirmation times
3. Transform Go-lachesis Consensus to have Tendermint-like ABCI-compatibility: Increase compatibility with a variety of different technologies. (Q2) Expand interoperability with different chains. (Q3)
4. Keep improving the consensus engine. (Q3)
5. Increase number of validators to 50 (Q4)
6. Increase Lachesis’s performance to 20 blocks/second, 40 txns/block on a single test network with a quorum of 30 validators (Q4)
7. Establish plan for supporting hundreds of watcher nodes (Q4)
8. Implement governance contract as the owner of SFC, where Fantom token holders and validators can vote on changes to the SFC (Q3)
9. ETC added as collateral on Xar Network (Q2)
10. Keep improving the middleware stack (Q3-4):

The current integration with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) has been incredibly useful. However, there are shortcomings:

• We have identified several scalability and security concerns due to limitations of the EVM.
• Working with universities, we aim to research and develop a new middleware stack to replace the EVM, such as a new database and interpreter, while maintaining compatibility with Solidity

Planning to have 5 minor releases a year and 3 protocol upgrades a year."

Usage

• From Our Network (27-8-2022):

"Because Multichain is the leading bridge on Fantom, it is an effective measure of investor sentiment. In the past 30 days on the Fantom network, there has been $31.7m deposited and $132.1m withdrawn. This indicates a majority of users are moving their money out of Fantom and deploying it elsewhere."

• Quickly gained a lot of TVL after the announcement of Ve(3, 3) in late 2021.
• From their Twitter (2-9-2021):

"Unique addresses are at 434,000, a growth of +152,000 (54%) since August 01. In August, Fantom saw 12,000,000 tx, 40% more than in July. Fantom has 906,000,000$ in TVL, a growth of $614m (210%) month-over-month. That’s an average of 404,000 tx per day. 63% of the $FTM supply is staked, consistent over the last couple of months."

• From their Twitter (21-6-2021):

"40+ dApps 10,576 smart contracts 300,000 txs per day 145,000+ unique addresses 62% staked"

• From their explorer (10-3-2020): Low number of validators (32) with 2130 delegators (33.66% of coins are delegated, 10.87% are staked).
• From this interview (31-5-2019) with Andre Cronje:

"The best apps for Fantom at present involve computing; other blockchains; gene splicing; protein folding; and other stuff that involves high computational power, in general. However, Andre feels that what Fantom is really built for doesn’t actually exist yet but will do moving forward."

• From an AMA (12-5-2019): "3 ~ 12 [[[Dapps]] at mainnet launch] based on current teams working on it."

Projects that use or built on it

• BadgerDAO; planning to deploy (17-3-2021)
• Cream Finance; launched on Fantom (4-3-2021).
• Curve; deployed (11-6-2021)
• Frozen Yoghurt; Curve fork launched on Fantom (5-5-2021).
• SushiSwap; deployed its contracts on it as part of adding support for 5 new chains (4-3-2021).
• yEarn; announced (8-10-2021). Became the number one DApp on the protocol in early 2022.

Competition

• Ethereum & Tezos and other DAG's like HashGraph, NANO and IOTA.
• From this interview (31-5-2019) with Andre Cronje:

"IOTA is a competitor but it is better suited for IOT due to the IOTA system growing faster based on the volume of transactions. In contrast, Fantom grows faster with increased computational power. Thus, there are different target markets."

• From an AMA (12-5-2019), on why it is better than Hashgraph:

"Not permissioned and network graph dependent. Can scale higher."

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Andre Cronje once said in an AMA that the team and he 'sucks' at building a wallet (12-5-2020) and therefore outsource 'all of that'.
• Has had clear staking concentrations, in one case 2 validators which held 1/3rd of all the network's stake combined, slowed down the network for seven hours (25-2-2021).

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Has the Fantom Foundation. Whole team can be found here (10-3-2020).
• Michael Kong; CIO
• Michael Chen; CMO
• Andre Cronje; technical advisor (was not around in the whitepaper but is now the main advisor)
• Alex Kampa; technical advisor (was already in the whitepaper, together with 11 other advisors)
• And GoFantom, which "builds the front-facing layer of our ecosystem, including tools for developers". GoFantom came onboard full time after it had submissions to the Fantom Development Contest. They are also (10-3-2020) a staker.

Funding

• From an AMA (12-5-2019):

"FVM funding is locked in for next 5 years. Verification is funded for next 2. Core team has runway for > 2

And increasing due to consulting income. Mostly consulting how to build on Fantom."

• Fantom currently (6-2019) has a 2-year runway for development without selling any Foundation tokens. This was mentioned in an AMA and alleviates any potential funding issues.
• From venture rounds they made $40M.
• Full list can be found here (9-3-2020). Some well known are:

One Block Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, 8 Decimal Capital, Nirvana and DFund.

• Their investor network includes firms such as Signum Capital, Obsidian Capital and DHVC.
• From Binance (10-3-2020):

"Fantom holds its cryptocurrency funds in a number of single-signature wallets held by different persons within the organization, whose identity the team chose not to disclose for security reasons. Fantom's fiat currencies are held in a bank account that requires the approval of two of three individuals within Fantom for payments to go out."

Partners

• From the GoFantom website (10-3-2020):

"Fantom is cooperating with commercial and central banks and governments in South Africa, Middle East and Europe"

Has a collaboration (26-2-2020) with the Ministry of Health in Afghanistan with a focus on digital certification and supply chain tracking.

• Is partners (27-12-2019) with the University of Sydney and Yonsei University

• From Messari (9-3-2020):

"In May 2019, Fantom announced that they will be working with Binance Chain to improve interoperability through the creation of a multi asset and cross chain ecosystem, supporting a multitude of tokens including the ERC-20 standard, the native Fantom token standard, and the BEP-2 token standard coined on Binance Chain."

• Has a partnership (6-2019) with South Korea’s Food Tech Association, comprised of prominent businesses in South Korea’s $200bn food market. 

• Fantom was one of 11 invited companies to the Smart City initiative in Dubai, where they are working on a number of opportunities.
• Band Protocol and Fantom collaborate (19-3-2020) on bringing oracles to Opera Mainnet. Update: has now been integrated (18-9-2020).
• Has a partnership with Bitmax (12-5-2019).
• API3; is mentioned as a partner on their website (5-3-2021).