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The Fantom blockchain is envisioned to be a high-performant, scalable, and secure EVM-compatible smart contract platform. Its mainnet – Fantom Opera – utilizes the Lachesis consensus mechanism, Fantom’s own aBFT validation algorithm. The modular architecture of the network allows for the creation of fully customizable blockchains supporting digital assets, with various functionalities depending on their use case. Fantom’s Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism is said to be the main reason for its highly scalable, permissionless, and decentralized ecosystem.
Fantom is designed to be modular and built with multiple layers, one of which is its consensus layer, which can be stacked and “plugged” into any distributed ledger. The so-called Lachesis consensus mechanism, powering the Fantom Opera mainnet, uses an instance of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and is fully compatible with Ethereum-powered protocols, moreover, Lachesis also supports Cosmos SDK. Fantom’s advantageous low fees and high throughput are said to be made highly accessible to developers wanting to port their existing Ethereum-based dApps.
The Lachesis consensus is designed to be able to scale to hundreds of nodes and increase its decentralization and security if such a need arises. As Lachesis has its own layer on the blockchain, developers creating dApps don’t need to create their own networking layer.
The main advantages of the consensus algorithm applied by Fantom include its asynchrony, which provides network participants with the freedom to process commands independently of each other, at different times. The Asynchronous Byzantine Fault-Tolerance principle, around which the consensus is built, can support one-third of its nodes’ malicious behavior, and due to it being leaderless (there are no master or leader nodes) is seen as highly secure and decentralized. The Lachesis output’s finality is immediate, there is no need for block confirmations, thus lowering the time to finality of transactions on Fantom Opera to around 1-2 seconds.
The Lachesis Consensus utilizes Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), which capture the past-to-present relationship between events and are used to calculate an exact and final order of events (transactions) on the blockchain. All event blocks are divided into confirmed and unconfirmed blocks, those from the past 3+ frames are all confirmed and ordered by honest nodes, while new event blocks are being validated. This results in batches of confirmed event blocks, each referred to as a block. The finalized blocks that form the final chain are calculated from previous event blocks, independently by each node.
Fantom nodes do not send blocks to each other, but sync events between themselves. Fantom validators do not vote on a concrete state of the Fantom blockchain, instead, they exchange observed events with other validators. When reaching consensus, Lachesis nodes do not vote on new events but use them to vote for the past two or three events’ (blocks) validity. This method leads to a much lower number of newly created consensus messages than classical PoS protocols, allowing Fantom to achieve its high time-to-finality throughput.
Furthermore, as Lachesis’s event structure is ultimately a DAG of events, to optimize storage and retrieval, all DAGs are divided into sub-DAGs, named Epochs. The end of an epoch is marked as sealed when one of the following conditions is satisfied – the Epoch has reached a predefined number of blocks, the Epoch has lasted for a preset time period, there has been at least one cheater confirmed in a block, or the sealing of the Epoch has been requested by the NodeDriver smart contract. When an Epoch is sealed its inner Epoch indexes are cut back and new events part of it are ignored since each Epoch forms a separate DAG, which disallows multiple parents.
To run a validator node on Fantom Opera, users need to cover a minimum stake of 500,000 FTM tokens and have less than the maximum, currently set at 15x the self-stake amount. There are also minimum hardware requirements available on the official documentation webpage of Fantom Opera. Validator nodes are rewarded the normal staked FTM APY on self-stake and 15% of their delegators’ rewards. The Fantom APY varies based on the staked percentage.
Fantom Validator nodes can either be run on a user’s hardware, or through a cloud provider. Fully detailed guides on both options and a list of node providers are available on the project’s documentation web page.
Fantom also includes multisig support called Fantom Safe built on top of the Gnosis Safe project. The product can be used with FTM and ERC20 tokens, which can be transferred in the same way as standard account transfers. The Fantom Safe dashboard shows fiat values of all assets contained in it.
Fantom fees are paid in FTM tokens and are rewarded to validators for processing transactions. The Fantom fees reward distribution is subject to governance and managed by an SFC contract that can be upgraded at any time without a hardfork. The current Fantom fees distribution model burns 30% of the transaction fees, while the remaining 70% are distributed proportionally to validators’ transactions reward weight between validator nodes. This is calculated at the end of each epoch and takes into consideration the originated fee, the nodes’ uptime, and its stake weight (the sum of delegations to a validator, including its self-delegation). Further details are provided on the Fantom GitHub webpage.
The official Fantom wallet is fWallet and it can be used as a browser extension for Chrome on Windows/macOS/Linux devices, as well as a mobile app for iOS or Android devices. The Fantom Opera mainnet can also be accessed with MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, Trust Wallet, and many other software wallets, as well as hardware solutions like Trezor and Ledger.
Fantom Opera FTM staking rewards users with FTM tokens in exchange for their participation in the network’s security by locking their FTM, with a varying APY depending on the lock-up period and the stake’s size. Fantom staking has a seven-day unbonding period before staked funds are available when a user wishes to unstake their assets, and there is a 15% fixed fee on staking rewards paid from stakers to validators.
The Fantom Opera native token FTM is in circulation in the form of an ERC20 standard token, BEP2 standard token, and naturally as an Opera FTM standard token. However, prior to using it on the Fantom Opera mainnet the token needs to be swapped to the Opera FTM standard, the Fantom team recommends the Multichain bridge for this purpose.
The main purpose of the FTM token is the network’s security as it is a requirement in the PoS validation of the blockchain. FTM is also used as a means of payment for network fees and gets distributed to validator nodes in the form of rewards. FTM is also the governance token of the Fantom blockchain. 1 FTM token holds 1 vote which can be enforced by validators and delegators.
The total supply of FTM is 3.175 billion, the coins currently out of circulation are reserved for staking rewards. The total supply of the FTM coin is distributed over the three different token standards it is available in – ERC-20, BEP-20, and FTM. Upon launch in late December 2019, the token was distributed as follows: 40% for a public sale, 30% for market development, 15% for advisors and contributors subject to a three-month lock-up period, and 15% for Fantom team members under 24 months vesting.
The project was founded by computer scientist Dr. Ahn Byung Ik, who is claimed to be “the first one to resolve the difficulties we had in real-life with blockchains”, in a blog article by the Fantom Foundation comparing him to Elon Musk. Apparently, Dr. Ahn’s experience in running a Foodtech smartphone application called SikSin allowed him to understand the concerns of the Foodtech industry in supply chain management. More precisely, it is claimed that since consumer evaluation of restaurants is managed by a centralized third party it is “unreliable and subject to corruption”. This along with ideas regarding the solution to many of the Foodtech’s supply chain management problems led Dr. Ahn to gather with researchers at Yonsei Universities and Oracle Korea in the development of a fast, secure, and scalable generalizable smart contract platform, based on the DAG concept.
The Fantom Opera team is operated by the Fantom Foundation and is made up of engineers, scientists, researchers, designers, and entrepreneurs. The current Fantom team is led by CEO Michael Kong, CTO Quan Nguyen, and Director David Richardson, among others.
Fantom is partnering with Crypto.com in the exchange of its FTM token, and the platform has integrated the Fantom RSS news feed to its app under the Fantom price page. Another of the most recent partnerships of the project is with Travala.com – a blockchain-based travel booking platform, which will allow FTM token holders to be used for bookings. A collaboration with Ethereum Classic Labs. Allows ETC to be used as collateral on Fantom Finance, Fantom’s DeFi suite, where another partnership – this time with Waves allows WAVES token holders to use it as collateral to mint the fUSD stablecoin. A constantly updated list of all Fantom Partnerships is available on the project’s webpage.
There are no concrete goals or Fantom roadmap published currently, but the team is working on the development and maintenance of the blockchain, with updates on development ideas being shared and discussed with the community, through its social media accounts.
https://docs.fantom.foundation/
https://www.fantom.foundation/fantom-research-papers/
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Last updated: Aug 22, 2023
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