Author: Daniel Li

In the current cryptocurrency market, the old-school 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 pullback in the entire market due to Japan's interest rate hike, with both Bitcoin and Ethereum experiencing a decline, FTM still rose by 30% against the trend. This astonishing 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 promotion by Andre Cronje (AC), a director of the Fantom Foundation, has injected new vitality and confidence into Fantom, rekindling people's confidence in the old project Fantom. Secondly, the market has positive expectations for the upcoming launch of 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.

01. The resurgence of the old-school 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's original intention was 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 craze, AC created star projects such as Yearn Finance, Phantom, and also made prolific contributions to many important projects such as Keep3r Network, Multichain, Chainlist, Solidly, and Bribe crv Finance.

AC's involvement made a huge contribution to Fantom's technical breakthroughs, especially in driving Fantom's multi-chain work. Fantom adopts the advanced aBFT (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism Lachesis, which is based on a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) improved version, allowing different blockchains to exist asynchronously without slowing down the main network. In addition, Lachesis can achieve almost instant transaction completion and can resist malicious behavior from up to one-third of the network participants. This mechanism makes Fantom faster, cheaper, and more secure than previous technologies, solving the long-standing trilemma of blockchain that many Layer 1 blockchains have been unable to overcome.

In 2019, Fantom released 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 period when Fantom Opera was launched, 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 instead 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 once 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.

FTM has surged by nearly 200% since the beginning of the year. This growth is partly due to Andre Cronje's active promotion, as he even used memes to promote Fantom, stating that Fantom Sonic will bring better efficiency than the parallel EVM path. Despite being questioned by some new public chains, Fantom has attracted great attention in a short period of time. At the same time, the long-dormant Fantom has made significant breakthroughs in the technical field. The Fantom Foundation announced the upcoming launch of the latest technological upgrade, Fantom Sonic, this year, and AC has high hopes for it, stating that it is expected to surpass the existing "parallel EVM" and trigger a revolutionary change.

02. What is Fantom Sonic?

Fantom Sonic is the latest technological upgrade of the Fantom network, aimed at enhancing the network's scalability 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 technological advancement that the Fantom community and the DeFi ecosystem have long awaited.

Fantom Sonic introduces a series of innovative technologies and optimization solutions, further strengthening 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 environment for smart contract execution, 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 has elevated the efficiency of smart contract development and execution 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 has successfully reduced 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 basis for 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 network throughput, and enhances performance. This optimization enables the Fantom network to handle more transactions and achieve lower transaction latency while ensuring security.

4. High Throughput and Low Latency: The theoretical transaction 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 fast transaction confirmations, 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, providing users with 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 and provides 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.

The release of Sonic marks the beginning of a new chapter for Fantom. After the upgrade, Fantom not only has non-forking upgrades, true parallel transactions, top TPS, and finality, but also has a range of outstanding features such as reducing local smart contract wallet and data storage requirements by 90%, making it an advanced platform that sets it apart from other Layer 1 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 current market value is only $3 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 helps it reach new heights.

In the current bull market, the Meme coin ecosystem has become a battleground for public chains. In the early stages of the bull market, Solana relied on the popularity of Bonk to maintain confidence in the Solana ecosystem and SOL holders, allowing Solana to truly recover. 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 specifically reposted an introduction to the $GOAT Meme, making $GOAT the most held Meme coin on Fantom within just one day (with over 1,000 holders).

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 a thriving ecosystem. Although the Fantom ecosystem has already surpassed 250 projects, its ecosystem is not active. According to data from tokenterminal, Fantom has an average of about 50,000 daily active users in the past month. Overall, the ecosystem's activity still lags behind public chains like Ethereum and Solana. Therefore, it is not realistic to rely on Meme to drive user growth in the Fantom ecosystem at the moment; Fantom needs to find a development path that suits itself.

In the "Fantom 2024 Q1 Overview," in addition to detailing Fantom's performance advantages, a comparison with the competitor Solana was made. Solana prioritizes network speed and low transaction costs, which has led to its security being heavily questioned, as it has experienced multiple instances of downtime due to serious errors since 2021. 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 participating angel investor being the founder of Frax Finance. Cooperation with Frax may find new paths for the revival of DeFi on Fantom.

The Fantom Foundation also has high hopes for the development of Sonic 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 said, "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."

03. Inventory of Fantom Sonic Ecosystem Projects

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, investing significant resources and technology to support developers in building new projects.

The recently announced winners of the Sonic Labs Entrepreneurship 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, among others. 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 their 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 required for perpetual trading applications.

Social Protocol Thunder Dome

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

In Thunder Dome, users can purchase tickets to participate in different types of communities and establish connections within them. Additionally, users can generate income through Thunder Dome. Holders of individual tickets can earn 5% of the trading amount, while holders of group and theme tickets share 5% of the trading volume profits proportionally 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 release.

P2P Lending Platform Debita: Debita is a P2P non-Oracle lending protocol on Fantom, aiming 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.

The Debita platform offers a range of unique and attractive features, such as fair interest rates and tokenization of 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 information about KiriCoin is relatively scarce, its recognition through the Sonic Labs award indicates its potential. By combining Fantom's advanced technology with KiriCoin's sustainable development principles, we can anticipate that this project will play a significant role in promoting a more environmentally friendly and sustainable world in the future.

RPG Blockchain Game Froqorion: Froqorion, a Sonic Labs incubation project under the Fantom Foundation, is an innovative game within the Fantom ecosystem. Set in an ancient frog civilization called Froqorion, players take on the role of heroes within this civilization. The game employs team-based RPG gameplay, where players aim to collect the powers of the four elements (earth, wind, fire, water) and form a team to complete various quests and adventures through cooperation.

As part of the Fantom ecosystem, Froqorion also offers features 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.

04. Conclusion

After the Cancun upgrade, the market's attention has shifted to solving blockchain scalability through layer 2, and the emergence of Sonic has provided a new perspective. Sonic, as the most scalable and secure blockchain technology on Fantom to date, achieves true 2,000 TPS transaction processing speed, 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 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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