Sonic (S)

From CryptoWiki

"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
TypeSmart Contract Platform
Consensus mechanismDAG
Total supplyCMC: 1,987,133,655 FTM Messari: 3,175,000,000.00 FTM
Websitehttps://fantom.foundation/

Basics

History

"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

"The Fantom Foundation announced a collaboration with the security and analysis platform Dedaub in order to bolster Fantom’s decentralized finance (defi) ecosystem. Dedaub’s monitoring system called Watchdog will monitor smart contracts on the Fantom blockchain for exploits and buggy code."

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

Delegated On-Chain Vote

"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."

DAO

Treasury

  • From a sponsored Blockbytes blog (9-2-2023):

"The Fantom Ecosystem Vault has been created to offer the community an avenue for funding projects, ideas, and creations through the community-driven decision process. The on-chain fund is financed by 10% of the transaction feeds on Fantom and is controlled by the community. The initiative was made possible by decreasing the burn rate of FTM and redirecting the resulting 10% to the Vault."

Token

Launch

Token allocation

  • Andre claimed: "At launch, Fantom owned less than 3%, today we own more than 14%." (12-2022)
  • 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

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."

Stablecoin

  • From a sponsored Blockbytes blog (9-2-2023):

"Andre Cronje has released an update on the goals of fUSD v2 & how Fantom will migrate from fUSD v1 to fUSD v2 in the future. V2 will allow the stakeholders to allocate fees in either fantom (FTM) or fUSD and to predict future costs based on usage. It will allow programmers to build additional institutional products for users and provide a more consistent system for planning and budgeting for grants. The migration to the new fUSD will result in the liquidation of any positions where fUSD debt is equal to or greater than the FTM backing it."

Coin Distribution

  • Andre claimed: "At launch, Fantom owned less than 3%, today we own more than 14%." (12-2022), this seems to contradict with the initial token distribution numbers however.

Technology

"With Fantom’s consensus lachesis, if we remove the EVM and just do direct transfers, our TPS caps out at ~28,000 (as last stress tested 12/2018, by now this limit is higher). If we enable the EVM, we cap out at ~700 TPS. The bottleneck is EVM (or rather complex storage and computation in a sequential context)."

How it works

"Each time one of the parties interact with each other, they share all the other knowledge they have with each other;

Alice sends Bob 1FTM, Alice & Bob know that Alice sent Bob 1FTM

Bob sends Alice 1FTM, Alice & Bob know that Alice sent Bob 1FTM, and that Bob sent Alice 1FTM

Charlie sends Bob 1FTM, Bob tells Charlie that Alice sent Bob 1FTM, and that Bob sent Alice 1FTM

Since Bob is aware of the transactions between Alice & Bob & Charlie, and Charlie is aware of the transactions between Alice & Bob & Charlie, 2 out of 3 participants have agreed, it is considered valid.

Consensus was achieved through normal interaction.

The above is grossly oversimplified, and in future articles I will dig deeper into what differentiates Fantom consensus even further, but the above should be able to showcase that Fantom consensus is horizontally scalable (as more parties are introduced the complexity of communication remains the same — unlike PoS), and it has inherent time ordering. The above is why Fantom is the only blockchain with consistent sub second finality."

"'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."

"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."

"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."

Fees

Upgrades

Staking

"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."

"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).

Liquidity Mining

Scaling

  • Is working on infinite storage and computation through Zks (15-11-2022).

Different Implementations

Interoperability

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

Other Details

Oracle Method

Their Other Projects

Xar Network

"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."

“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

"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"
  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

"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."

"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

Competition

"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."

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

Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

  • Had investment from bankrupt Alameda Research/FTX, which came out (11-11-2022) during the FTX crash. This could mean fall-out risk.
  • 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

Funding

  • Andre opened up on Fantom's financials (30-11-2022):

"When crypto valuations fell in late 2018, the Fantom Foundation was left with a fraction of the $40M it had raised only six months earlier, Cronje wrote in a Monday blog post titled “Fantom: an inside financial peek at being a ‘crypto company.’” But the pandemic-era boom known as DeFi summer paid dividends. So, too, did the Foundation’s willingness to take advantage of sky-high DeFi yields, which have since proven fleeting. The Foundation now has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto assets, enough to continue operations for another 30 years, according to Cronje. In early 2020, with just $3.5M in assets, started “aggressively participating” in DeFi, yield farming on Compound and Synthetix. By May of 2021, it had $1.5B. The Foundation now has more than $100M in stablecoins, more than $100M in other crypto assets and $50M in non-crypto assets, according to Cronje. With compensation running $7M per year, it has enough money to cover business expenses for at least 30 years, although that could drop in the event crypto prices plummet even further."

"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.

"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."

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