AD: Before I begin this post, I’d like to briefly mention Bitcoin.Live, who are sponsoring my blog.
Bitcoin.Live offers regular, detailed content on their free-to-access blog, created by a panel of analysts (including Peter Brandt), and covering all manner of market-related topics. I found both the video material and the blog posts to be genuinely insightful, with many differing analytical perspectives available for viewers and readers. The platform also offers premium content for paying subscribers who find value in the free material, with daily videos, alerts and support provided. Check it out and bookmark the blog.
N.B: In the spirit of full transparency, the following Coin Report on Fantom is a Sponsored Post.
Welcome to the 23rd Coin Report. In today’s report, I will be assessing the fundamental and technical strengths and weaknesses of Fantom. This will comprise of an analysis of a number of significant metrics, an evaluation of the project’s community and development and an overview of its price-history. The report will conclude with a grading out of 10. I hope you enjoy the read!
Introduction
Prior to researching this report, I had seen the name Fantom bouncing around Twitter, often coupled with a sense of fervour. Besides the palpable excitement surrounding the project, I knew very little of it, and this research process has been more eye-opening than most as to the technological developments taking place in the space. I’m sure we all can agree that the pace of advance is somewhat overwhelming at times, and, even for somebody who spends each and every day consumed by it all, it’s often difficult to keep up. Fantom is a fascinating project, on all accounts, and I expect today’s report to be of great interest to readers.
I hope that this report will prove objective where it must be and fair on more subjective matters. For those who’d like to learn a little more about Fantom prior to reading this report, here are some primary links:
Fundamental
General:
Name: Fantom
Ticker: FTM
Algorithm: ERC-20/BEP-2 (native token upon mainnet release, also)
Sector: DAG-Based Smart Contracts Platform
Exchanges: KuCoin, DigiFinex, BitMax, Hotbit, IDEX, Binance DEX, Bibox and Bilaxy
Launch Overview
Fantom was launched in May 2018 with an ICO for its ERC-20 token, FTM. The ICO comprised of four rounds, three of which were private and one of which was public, and raised $39.4mn at the time of the sale. This was a complete sellout of the 40% of its maximum supply allocated for the sale, equating to 1.27bn FTM.
The token and its crowdsale was a means by which to fund the development of its own mainnet, which is built as a Directed Acyclic Graph utilising asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance to ensure fast and scalable smart contracts execution without sacrificing security or decentralisation. The current FTM token will operate alongside a native token upon release of the mainnet and a recently created BEP-2 FTM token, as the project seeks to manifest interoperability. I shall discuss all of this at length a little later…
Price-History Overview
As Fantom was only founded in May 2018 and has only been trading since Q4 2018, there is very little price-history available. Despite this, there have been a couple of shorter-term market cycles that have played out, which I’ll analyse towards the end of this report. For now, it will suffice to say that Fantom formed its all-time high of 420 satoshis shortly after it first listed on exchanges following its ICO. Subsequently, price bled out to find an all-time low of 89 satoshis in February 2019.
Project Overview
As stated briefly above, Fantom is seeking to build the world’s first DAG-based smart contracts platform that operates with greater transaction throughput than any other such platform at faster speeds and with more resilient security. More significantly, it seeks to solve the scalability issues present in current smart contracts solutions such as Ethereum.
Beyond this, it is also building cross-chain asset interoperability, which, put simply, means that the same token utilising the same supply will be usable on different distributed ledger technologies, achieved by building bridges that facilitate seamless swapping from one chain to another.
As stated in their whitepaper:
“The vision of FANTOM is to grant compatibility between all transaction bodies around the world using fast DAG technology that can be deployed at scale in the real world, and to create new infrastructure with high reliability that allows for real-time transactions and data sharing.
FANTOM has the intention of being used on a large scale in various industry verticals, such as telecommunication, finance, logistics, electric vehicle provision and others. The FANTOM Foundation intends to create the FANTOM platform along with a new Smart Contract-based ecosystem that can be used by all current and future partner companies around the world.
To facilitate consistent global transactions with high accuracy and reliability, the FANTOM Foundation will lead the next generation of distributed ledger technologies. The platform intends to be open-source: used and changed by the community, and to provide various application support tools that can be used to create decentralised applications (DApps).
These are about as grand ambitions as they come in this space, with fierce competition from the most well-funded projects currently in existence. I am intrigued to see how Fantom is progressing given its relatively small size.
Let’s begin with some Metric Analysis:
Metric Analysis:
Below are listed a number of important metrics, all of which are accurate as of 5th June 2019. For anyone reading this who has yet to read a Coin Report, it might be worth reading this section of the first report, where any potentially unfamiliar terms are explained. For any terms or metrics specific to this post, I will provide explanations besides the figures.
Metrics:
General:
Price: $0.019 (237 satoshis)
Circulating Supply: 2,007,248,313 FTM
Total Supply: 2,007,248,313 FTM
Exchange Volume: $4.946mn
Network Value: $37.215mn (4757.18 BTC)
Maximum Supply: 3,175,000,000 FTM
% of Max. Supply Minted: 63.22%
Network Value at Max. Supply: $58.866mn
Exchange Volume-to-Network Value: 13.29%
Category: Midcap
Average Price (30-Day): $0.014
Average Exchange Volume (30-Day): $4.379mn
Average Network Value (30-Day): $26.066mn
Average Exchange Volume (30-Day)-to-Network Value: 16.8%
Volatility* (30-Day): -0.23089
Average Daily On-Chain Transactions (7-Day): 316
Average Daily Transactional Value** (7-Day): $1.042mn (source)
NVT*** (30-Day): 35.69
% Price Change USD (30-Day): +107.7%
% Price Change USD (1-Year): N/A
USD All-Time High: $0.038
% From USD All-Time High: -52.3%
Premine % of Max. Supply: N/A
Premine Location: N/A
Liquidity (calculated as the sum of BTC in the buy-side with 10% of current price across all exchanges): 8.52 BTC
Liquidity-to-Network Value %: 0.18%
Supply Available on Exchanges: 60,875,775 FTM
% of Circulating Supply Available on Exchanges: 3.03%
*Volatility is calculated by taking the average price over the given time-period, calculating the difference between it and the highest price and it and the lowest price over that same time-period, and multiplying those figures together. The closer to 0, the less volatility during that period, and vice-versa. Read this for more on volatility.
**Transactional Value in $ is calculated by taking the daily transactional value in FTM and multiplying it by price.
***NVT is calculated by dividing the Network Value by the Average Daily Transactional Value. See here for more on NVT.
Supply Emission & Inflation:
Block Reward Schedule: Released in full when mainnet is released in Q3. ~682k FTM to be emitted daily via staking rewards for ~4 years.
Average Block Time: N/A
Current Block Height: N/A
Annual Supply Emission: 249,085,125 FTM (590 BTC at current prices)
Annual Inflation Rate: 12.41%
Circulating Supply in 365 Days: 2,256,333,438 FTM
Staking & Masternodes:
Network Staking Weight: N/A – staking goes live upon mainnet release
Staking ROI (Annual): Expected ~15%
Validator Node Collateral Size: 3,175,000 FTM
Validator Node Price: ~7.5 BTC (~$60,000 at current prices)
Masternode Count: N/A – validator nodes go live upon mainnet release
Masternode Count Growth (30-Day): N/A
Supply Locked in Masternodes: N/A
Masternode ROI (Annual): N/A
Masternode Reward / Block Reward: N/A
MNV / Network Value: N/A
ICO:
The following details were taken from here and here.
ICO Period: February 1st 2018 – June 16th 2018 (4 separate rounds)
Total Tokens: 3,175,000,000 FTM
Tokens Available For Sale: 1,270,000,000 FTM
Tokens Sold: 1,270,000,000 FTM
Total Raised ($): $39.4mn
Average ICO Price Per Token: $0.03
Notes: 40% of maximum supply available for crowdsale. 30% allocated to market development. 15% to advisors. 15% to the team and Fantom Foundation, however these rewards, which were being released monthly, have now ceased and 996mn FTM is now allocated to the staking rewards upon mainnet release.
Distribution:
Address Count: 6099
Supply Held By Top 10 Addresses: 42.11%
Supply Held By Top 20 Addresses: 51.178%
Supply Held By Top 100 Addresses: 69.11%
Inactive Address Count in Top 20 (30 Days of No Activity): 9
Analysis:
There’s rather a lot to get through here, and there are a number of very interesting metrics that have cropped up.
Although Fantom’s mainnet is not yet live, and thus transaction-related metrics are not quite as significant as they will be moving forward, let’s begin with these, as they may give us an indication as to the potential transactional demand for FTM.
I calculated that, across a 7-day period, there were an average of 316 daily on-chain transactions. The value of these transactions amounted to $1.042mn on average, daily. This is rather impressive given that Fantom’s mainnet is not yet live and these transactions are occurring on Ethereum’s blockchain; one would expect this figure to be greater when FTM is used to deploy smart contracts and to transact on the Fantom network. More impressive still is the fact that this gives Fantom a 7-day NVT of 35.69; only twice that of Bitcoin’s current NVT of ~17, as calculated by Messari.
Now, let’s take a look at the remaining General metrics, before moving onto Supply Emission & Inflation and Staking, concluding this section with some Distribution analysis:
Firstly, it is clear that Fantom has been incredibly volatile of late, indicating that its accumulation period is ended and a new bull cycle has begun. I calculated its 30-day Volatility to be -0.23089; the highest figure of any coin previously reported on. This is corroborated by the 30-day performance of +107%. We shall look more closely at the implications of this in the Technical section, but it appears that the low-risk entries are no longer in play.
Next, let’s take a look at the liquidity-related metrics:
I calculated Fantom to have buy-side Liquidity of 8.52 BTC within 10% of current price across listed exchanges, equating to 0.18% of its Network Value. This is not particularly strong, placing it around the middle of the pack amongst coins from previous reports. However, this is likely a symptom of the fact that Fantom is not yet listed on any of the larger exchanges.
Moving onto sell-side Liquidity, I calculated that there is ~60.8mn FTM available for purchase on the orderbooks on listed exchanges, equating to 3.03% of its Circulating Supply. This indicates a relative lack of incentive to currently hold Fantom, rather than to trade it speculatively; such is often the case prior to project’s mainnet development being released. As we’ll discuss later, there are reward incentives in place upon mainnet release. However, for now, Fantom has the 4th-highest percentage of its circulating supply available on exchanges.
Now, let us take a look at some volume-related metrics:
Fantom traded $4.94mn of speculative volume in the past 24 hours, equating to 13.29% of its Network Value, despite not being listed on any of the more prominent exchanges; whilst this figure is incredibly strong and certainly indicative of speculative interest, it is undoubtedly inflated by wash-trading on some of the smaller listed exchanges. That being said, there is a great deal of consistency, as Fantom has traded $4.39mn on average daily for the past 30 days, equating to 16.8% of its Average Network Value for the same period. This is the highest figure of any coin previously reported on, and by some margin, with Own ranking second at 10.5%.
Moving onto Supply Emission, upon release of the Mainnet in Q3, Fantom has reserved ~996mn FTM of its maximum supply of 3.175bn FTM to be released over the course of 4 years in the form of staking rewards. This equates to ~682k FTM of daily emissions, or a little shy of 250mn FTM annually. This equates to 590 BTC at current prices, and will give Fantom a modest annual inflation rate of around 12.4%.
However, it is not merely the supply emission that is significant, but rather the relationship between it and traded volume:
Given the above calculations, Fantom is expected to emit around $13,000-worth of FTM at current prices on a daily basis. As Fantom traded $4.94mn of volume on exchanges over the past 24 hours, this covers its average daily emissions by a whopping 380x. Further, its average daily volume for the past 30 days covers daily emissions by 337x. In short, there is absolutely zero indication that current prices are not sustainable, even if only a fraction of Fantom’s volume was real. Further, and more significantly, Fantom’s Liquidity of 8.52 BTC covers average daily supply emission by over 500%. Thus, there should be no real headwinds to price growth from the imminent increase in supply emission.
Now, let’s briefly cover the Staking and Masternodes section before concluding with some Distribution analysis:
Whilst staking is not yet live for Fantom, we do have details on how the implementation will operate. Firstly, Fantom will have a network of validator nodes that require 3.175mn FTM to be locked up, equating to ~$60,000 at current prices. These will receive staking rewards at an expected annual ROI of ~15%.
Finally, let’s take a look at Distribution:
Fantom currently has 6099 holders, with the top 10 addresses controlling 42.11%; the top 20 controlling 51.78%; and the top 100 controlling 69.11%. However, the 1st, 5th, 6th, 7th, 10th and 19th-richest addresses belong to exchanges. Further, 9 of the remaining 14 addresses of the top 20 are inactive over the past 30 days.
Regarding the remaining 5 active top 20 addresses, the 9th-richest is accumulating, having added 4.4mn FTM in the past month; the 11th-richest added 8.4mn FTM in the past week; the 12th-richest distributed 5mn in the past month; the 14th-richest added 12mn in the past month; and the 17th-richest bought their entire 17mn FTM position in the past month. Overall, clearly the largest holders are either buying or holding.
That concludes this section on Metrics. Let’s move onto the Fantom Community:
Community:
There are two primary aspects of community analysis: social media presence and Bitcointalk threads. I’ll begin with the former before moving on to the latter.
Social Media:
Concerning social media presence, there are four main platforms to examine: Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and Discord.
Fantom is present on all four platforms. To begin, let’s look at the various social metrics that I calculated from the Fantom Twitter and Facebook accounts:
Twitter Followers: 14,175
Tweets: 479
Average Twitter Engagement: 1.3%
Facebook Likes: 897
Facebook Posts (30-Day): 0
Average Facebook Engagement: N/A
As usual, I will be using RivalIQ‘s social benchmark report for evaluation purposes.
Twitter:
The Fantom Twitter account has the 6th-largest audience of all previously reported-on coins, and, despite the relatively large audience, it does not disappoint for engagement. With an average engagement rate of 1.3%, it has 27x stronger engagement than the average across all industries and 144x stronger engagement than that of the Media industry (the most relevant industry in the report). Further, it also has the 6th-highest engagement rate of all previously reported-on coins.
Facebook:
Now, regarding Facebook, Fantom has a much smaller audience of 897 Likes, and this is likely explained by the lack of attention paid here, with 0 posts in the past 30 days, indicating its total abandonment. I believe a commitment to making a concerted effort here would pay dividends for the community growth of Fantom.
Discord:
The Fantom Discord has only 263 members, as it was only created a little over a week ago.
As such, there is very little in Announcements and the FAQ channel contains a 4-part Q&A relating to the Binance DEX listing. This could be dramatically improved by expanding the breadth of questions answered to make the channel a one-stop resource for new users. Official Links contains all relevant resources & social platforms; Technical Articles contains a handful of in-depth Medium posts on the various aspects of Fantom development; and Staking Information does something similar for the imminent staking
implementation. All of these channels are built within an Information menu, thus segregating the numerous topics in an orderly and accessible manner. Further, within this, Video Content contains links to interviews with team members and presentations and Written Content has a number of AMAs.
Commonly the most active channel in a Discord group, General has a few hundred messages over the past week since inception, and it is growing slowly in activity levels. Regarding the discussion within the channel, there is a lot of conversation around the creation of the BEP-2 token for FTM, facilitating trading on Binance DEX, alongside its ERC-20 token. A bridge is being created to allow for seamless transition between these two token formats for user accessibility. Besides this, most of the engagement is introductory, though there is palpable excitement regarding the project, and there are a number of Medium blog posts being pushed out, also. Lastly, I noticed that the creation of promotional materials was being incentivised by the team within the Questions channel.
Overall, promising beginnings.
Telegram:
The Fantom Telegram group is comprised of 18,276 members, which is larger than its Twitter audience and thus its most popular social platform.
Immediately, I noticed that the name Fantomians is prescribed to the community by the team, thus creating an identity and demonstrating the relationship between the team and the community to be an amicable one. Further, it indicates a conscious effort on the part of the team to strengthen the community and foster commitment to the project.
The pinned message contains a couple of recent articles: one on token economics and one recapping May. Further, it contains details on the recent conference in Luxembourg plus a number of relevant links for new users.
Upon reading through the group’s messages, I found palpable community interest and near 24/7 discussion and engagement. Within these messages, I found out a number of interesting things about Fantom:
Firstly, migration to BEP-2 is not mandatory, as the token swap is simply to facilitate trading on Binance DEX, with both token variants being utilised as part of a grander aim of interoperability. These will coexist with the native token upon mainnet release in Q3.
Further, the team are travelling to numerous international conferences this summer; staking is set to begin after mainnet launch; and, most significantly, Ethereum dAPPs will be deployable on Fantom within 5 minutes more cheaply than anywhere else.
Also, a number of new exchange listings are expected from Q4 onwards.
Regarding some confusion I initially found around supply metrics, within the Telegram group I found that there are currently ~2bn FTM in circulation and the maximum supply of 3.175bn will take 4 years to reach, with inflation occurring via staking rewards after mainnet launch. For this purpose, 33% of the maximum supply is set aside.
The concept of tokenised bartering was also brought up a number of times, related to the cross-chain interoperability being developed, and there is a great deal of excitement from the community about this. Further, there are expectations of a number of announcements set to take place over the coming weeks and months.
Scrolling further still, I found some more information relating to the confusion around team allocated tokens and future staking rewards, with all tokens from the token sale now unlocked and circulating, including advisor tokens, and the scheme for team allocation now scrapped and replaced by the staking rewards mechanism.
My immediate thoughts at this point were concerned with funding for the project, but we shall cover that towards the end of this report, as I uncovered more about this.
Support within the group is provided swiftly, team-led updates are pushed out often and, most surprisingly, tipping of FTM is very much prevalent.
Overall, very impressed.
BitcoinTalk:
No thread available.
Development:
For the following Development analysis, I will be evaluating project leadership, the website, the roadmap, the whitepaper, the wallets and finally providing a general overview:
Project Leadership:
There are 19 core team members listed on the website and over 30 Github contributors.
Full transparency of the core team is provided here, with names, photos and LinkedIn profiles. Further, and most importantly, details are provided with
each employee’s experience and area of expertise. Around 14 of the 19 are involved in development in some way or other.
The team is very strong across-the-board, though there is a significant imbalance towards development, as would be expected of such a project. However, there are core team members that have expertise in marketing but are not listed on the website, for whatever reason.
Website:
The website is clean and well-presented, though not particularly strong in its branding; minus the logo in the header, there is very little to show me that this is the Fantom website.
The homepage is emblazoned with the tagline “the nervous system for smart cities”, which is succinct and informative, though does not reflect the multifaceted development of the project.
Below this, however, there is a list of potential use-cases for the tech: smart cities; public utilities; smart living; healthcare; education; traffic management; resource management; and environmental sustainability.
Lower down the homepage can be found further details on each of these industries; this could be improved by more directly detailing the role of Fantom in each.
The website describes Fantom as a “distributed ledger technology stack” based on Directed Acylic Graph tech to enhance speed and scalability and ensure security for smart contract execution.
Towards the bottom of the homepage, we find a summary of recent news, and there is also a News and Updates tab in the navigation menu that links to a more detailed news directory, accompanied by team updates. Near the homepage footer, we find links to various PR materials across numerous news outlets like Nasdaq and Hacked.
Notably, social links are barely visible at the bottom. This does not facilitate seamless community growth. Further, the News & Updates page does not work particularly well, nor is it well-designed from a UI/UX perspective.
There is an entire page dedicated to the core team, providing full transparency alongside details of experience and expertise.
In the Developers section, we find numerous technical resources, like whitepapers and other development papers. There is also a link to the
Testnet, as well as a page for the Fantom Enterprise Alliance, comprising of numerous organisations across various industries. Lastly, Strategic Partners lists all of the private firms involved in the token sale.
Overall, whilst polished and informative, the website must be stronger in its sense of identity.
Roadmap:
The roadmap is not present on the website; however, there is one printed in the Executive Summary.
The roadmap itself is very brief and not particularly well-presented, in the form of a half-yearly timeline with no real detail about any of the milestones or goals. However, as it states in the introductory paragraph to the roadmap, the team anticipated the mainnet with smart contracts would be launched in Q3 2019 all the way back in May 2018, and it does seem to be the case that they’re right on schedule.
Concerning the content of the roadmap, it begins with June 2018, where the Lachesis protocol was validated, the Ware layer was beta launched and the ERC-20 FTM token was created. Moving onto Q3 2018, there is a note titled Middleware Layer but with no real explanation here, as well as the public API disclosure. Then, for Q1 2019, we have completion of the OPERA core layer development, the beta release of the smart contracts functional language and its virtual machine. This is followed by the mainnet launch, expected in this current quarter of 2019, and the roadmap concludes with “global platform expansion”, “system model expansion” and “Fantom council establishment”.
Overall, this gives us a sense of the direction in which the project was intending to move but severely lacks the depth and detail one would expect from a serious roadmap.
Whitepaper:
There is a more technical, 50-page whitepaper available here, but for the purposes of this section, I will be referring to the Executive Summary:
The document is a 9-page summary of the primary aspects of Fantom and is dated May 2018, thus somewhat out-dated.
It begins with an explanation of the problems persistent in blockchains as a form of distributed ledger technology, primarily referring to scalability and throughput issues. Solutions for these problems are said to come via Directed Acyclic Graphs, currently in the form of Hashgraph, Nano and IOTA, with the technology removing the requirement for miners for consensus and thus improving transaction speeds. Unlike those other projects, Fantom will build smart contracts into a DAG-based platform to solve the issues currently faced by Ethereum.
The document states that Fantom is the “world’s first DAG-based smart contracts platform”, emphasising its unique positioning in the ecosystem. It introduces the reader to a novel protocol, developed by Fantom, called Lachesis, which will be utilised for consensus.
We are then shown the numerous use-cases of the OPERA chain, which has three layers: a Core; a Ware; and an Application layer. Lachesis comes into the fold by speeding up transactions to “above 300,000 TPS” whilst remaining “open-source and permissionless”. A diagram is provided to illustrate Fantom’s capacity above and beyond that of Steem, EOS and Cardano.
Moving on, details are provided on the aforementioned three-layer system of the so-called OPERA chain, with the Core layer maintaining consensus via Lachesis, the Ware layer facilitating rewards and payments and the Application layer providing APIs.
The Story Root functionality, the document goes on to introduce, will allow for transactions to be traced all the way back to their inception, assisting with supply-chain management.
Next, we are given further details on the dAPPs capabilities of Fantom, with applications built on the OPERA chain providing near-zero cost transactions with transparency and greater speed than other solutions, in industries such as: food; technology; telecommunication; banking; electricity and real estate.
Regarding Fantom’s marketing strategy, we are told of a partnership with South Korea’s Food Tech Association, comprised of prominent businesses in South Korea’s $200bn food market. This is promising stuff with regards to real-world usage.
Following this, there is a section on Token Economics, with visuals provided depicting the percentages of the 3.175bn FTM maximum supply being allocated to the token sale, market development, advisors and the founders, with a 40/30/15/15 split, respectively. However, this is out-dated information, as the team/founders rewards are no longer in play, with those being used for staking rewards upon mainnet release along with part of the market development tokens. All 40% allocated to the token sale were distributed.
Next, we have a roadmap, which I have covered in the above section.
And, to conclude, we are presented with a couple of pages detailing the team and their strategic partners, including Oracle, Coinsilium and the Food Tech Association.
Overall, the document is concise and informative, though a little dated.
Wallets:
FTM is currently able to be stored on all wallets that are ERC-20 or BEP-2 compatible.
General:
There are a number of miscellaneous points I’d like to round up here regarding the development of Fantom, as there are things I discovered from reading Medium blog posts and watching interviews that don’t belong in any other sections.
Firstly, referring back to my earlier comment about project funding when I discovered that the team’s tokens were now set to be used for staking rewards, I found out that Fantom currently has a 2-year runway for development without selling any Foundation tokens. This was mentioned in an AMA and alleviates any potential funding issues.
Next, regarding the utility of the FTM token itself, it will be used to pay for transaction fees, as well as take other actions on the network, including governance and staking, and it will function with cross-chain interoperability. There will be a BEP-2 FTM token for Binance Chain, an ERC-20 for Ethereum and also a token native to the Fantom network on the OPERA chain. Bridges will be used to seamlessly swap between these without the necessity for 3 entirely separate chains, thus the same supply is utilised between multiple chains.
Below are a few bullet points learned from the recent interview with Andre Cronje:
- The tagline “nervous system of smart cities” is one that Andre feels limits the scope of Fantom, with it being better positioned to have other blockchains “plug into it” for scalability and throughput capabilities.
- 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.
- 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.
- There are layer one solutions to scalability close to being fully developed, with Fusion’s DCRM protocol allowing a blockchain to effectively act as a custodian of assets of another blockchain, which Fantom will be utilising alongside its Lachesis consensus.
- The Lachesis Protocol is significant because it increases block generation speeds by utilising asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance, thus consensus is the primary problem being solved here. Byzantine fault tolerance is the mathematical guarantee that consensus is final, and aBFT is where no assumptions are made prior to consensus and thus the protocol is resilient to all manner of attacks.
Lastly, here are some quick bullet points I picked up from reading numerous Medium posts, all of which are linked below:
- There will be two ways to earn rewards by participating in the Fantom network once the mainnet is live: validator nodes and delegates.
- Validator nodes require 3.175m FTM to operate and receive staking rewards and partial transaction fees
- Delegators support validator nodes and receive a portions of their rewards but pay a 15% fee to the validator.
- Validators will be scored for quality.
- There is 4 year emission schedule, beginning with ~15% annual rewards. This incentivises the network.
- 996.341mn FTM are reserved for rewards, equating to 31.38% of max supply.
- 682,425 FTM will be emitted daily.
- 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.
- Fantom is in collaboration with Binance Chain, recently listed on its DEX following the creation of the ERC-20 to BEP-2 bridge, in an effort to build multi-asset cross-chain interoperability.
- Fantom was one of 11 invited companies to the Smart City initiative in Dubai recently, where they are working on a number of opportunities.
https://medium.com/@FantomFDN/fantoms-proof-of-stake-decrypted-d34754caab28
https://medium.com/fantomfoundation/fantom-improvement-proposal-2-proof-of-stake-by-the-numbers-fip-2-a02404144322
https://medium.com/@michaelkong882/an-introduction-to-fantom-network-tokens-130f5d01cb89
https://medium.com/fantomfoundation/fantom-recap-for-may-2019-367d952b0790
https://medium.com/fantomfoundation/the-fantom-dubai-recap-e11d0e0a146e
And that concludes the fundamental analysis of Fantom. Let’s have a look at the chart:
Technical
Daily:
As can be seen from the Daily chart above, there is very little available price-history and yet there is a clear market cycle that has played out over the past few months.
Fantom formed its all-time high at 420 satoshis shortly after it was first listed on exchanges, but then spent a few months in decline, eventually bottoming at its all-time low of 89 satoshis in November 2018. This then led to a period of accumulation around this level and a subsequent bull cycle, with price reaching a short-term cyclical high of 372 satoshis in April 2019. This was followed by a swift retrace back towards the original accumulation area, with final capitulation sending prices down to a likely cyclical low of 100 satoshis. Price bounced back hard on solid volume from this area, reclaiming 200 satoshis as an area of prior resistance turned support. Since then, price has found resistance around 260 satoshis, but remains firm above 200, with recent consolidation looking like a precursor to another leg up.
That being said, we are in the middle of a cycle, and I am loathe to enter any positions once the bear cycle has ended. For those who would like to enter positions, however, an entry on a Daily close above 265 satoshis on solid volume with a stop-loss at 190 satoshis would make sense, with a target of the current all-time high of 420 satoshis and beyond.
Conclusion
This report is now approaching 6,000 words, and it is time to draw it to a close.
My final grading for Fantom is 9 out of 10.
Here, you can find my grading framework, for reference.
Lastly, here is a link to a Google Sheets file with any significant data from previous reports compiled for cross-comparative purposes. I will keep this updated as I continue to write these reports.
I hope this report has proved insightful and that you’ve enjoyed the read! Please do feel free to leave any questions in the Comments, and I’ll answer them as best I can.
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